Pandemonium Medicine Show

Photo credit: Marcial Hernandez

Probably not what you thought you'd be seeing when you came to this page!

"Shelley" is the newest VW ERL test vehicle and will be conquering Pike's Peak in 2011. Yes, that's a Java logo and she is indeed "Java Powered"! Shelley will be using Java Realtime and Solaris for her driving control, GPS integration, telemetry logging and portions of her safety system.

My part, thus far, has been to provide a Solaris CAN bus driver. Which I, unfortunately, had to write in C.

JTRES is focused on the application of Java for Realtime and Embedded applications. Many of the presentations and discussions focused on the existing Realtime Specification for Java aka RTSJ 1.0 aka JSR 1 but there were also a lot of interest in RTSJ 1.1 aka JSR 282.

The presentations also made it clear that Java and virtual machine technology have advanced significantly since Java Realtime was first conceived. The technology has matured through solving real-world problems--people are using Realtime Java and developing greater experience with it every day. The operating systems are improving, the JVMs are improving, the APIs are evolving and the application best practices are growing. Interesting challenges certainly remain; performance (always), scalability (always) but also the need to evolve to better support CMT and virtualization.

The conference keynote was delivered by James Gosling who has been a long time supporter of the Java Realtime initiative. My take away from the keynote was his question, which I've already been asking myself for a while, "Why not make realtime part of every JVM?" Game programmers need it, media applications need it, networking technology like JXTA can benefit from it. Realtime Java is also very well suited for embedded applications such as car computers, factory floor automation, consumer entertainment and communication devices.

I was involved with the low level drivers and board controls as well as the "industrial" user interface and other portions of getting the system operational. I also got to play with fun (dangerous) power tools a bit.

The rest of James' keynote can be found here : James Gosling JavaOne 2008 General Session

I've done most of my work using the 2.0 Solaris version but the new 2.1 version is expected soon. In addition to a new thread visualization tool, new DTrace scripts and other improvements the big news for the 2.1 release is that Java RTS now supports Linux. Two realtime Linux distributions have been qualified so far and more can probably be expected.