The Real-Time Specification for Java

Rating:
Summary: A good effort
Review: Assume that you've been given a mandate to turn an existing, popular language built on write-once run-anywhere (WORA) principles into a basis for implementing correct performance-critical applications on a wide variety of platforms. Thats exactly what the team who wrote this book were tasked to do - without changing the core Java language specification. Bearing these restrictions in mind, its a good effort. The specification addresses all the basic concerns of the real-time developer - concurrency, asynchronous event handling and transfer of control issues, timing, scheduling, memory and so on, though the introduction of a single package: javax.realtime.

In general the rich set of classes provided seem to be fairly straightforward, and will probably be easy to use when a reference implementation becomes available. Key concepts are illustrated with short examples - and here's my biggest criticism - they are often of appalling quality - typically they confuse rather than clarify matters. I appreciate that this is a specification rather than a tutorial but anyone who has to implement or use this standard needs all the help they can get! There a few other typos, especially in the method signatures but these are easily parseable nonetheless.

The biggest changes are going to be in the real-time virtual machines that will be built to support this standard. Comprehensive support for such features as configurable scheduling algorithms, dynamic schedulability (where schedulable objects are dynamically added to the schedule and feasibility is determined at runtime), asynchronous transfer of control on executing threads and so on - are going to require heavy-duty support at the virtual machine level. The specification doesn't state how these and other services will be implemented but gives a would-be real-time JVM implementor lots of hints on how to do, and how NOT to do a good job in this area - which is a welcome addition.

So, my recommendation. I'd give it 4 1/2 stars if I could - but lets be generous and give it 5. The only detraction is that a good dose of proofreading could have improved on the current release. That said, I have high hopes that this will eventually emerge as a real-time development standard in the same way that Ada 95 promised to, but never delivered on.

p.s. for distributed real-time transactions - you'll have to wait for an additional standard to address this issue : watch this space.

Rating:
Summary: Real Time indeed
Review: Hi all. This is a serious book on real time, even if you are not a java programmer. (by the way this is not a book on java for those who came here by mistake.)

I have used this book to help me build a project I am working on at my UNI and it's was very helpful. it is first of all Specification book so it main use for my opinion is a reference after the first reading an as such the book is very good. A real time programming background is essensial for really benefit from this book , but if you are one of the RTP so it's a book for you !

I gave it 4 stars because it's a spec and not my kind of books but it's a defenetly great spec. - Enjoy

Rating:
Summary: RT aspects when using Java
Review: Includes what you need to know about soft RT constraints when using Java. The garbage collection issue and more.

Rating:
Summary: Exact description of Java on RTS's
Review: The programming language Java is widely used for web applications, servers, compilers. The concurrency aspect is also known to all of us. But for real time systems development in Java was awaited. I being a teacher of RTS course was looking for the language to introduce the real time system concepts. This book is correct solution. It starts with real time threading. Scheduling, Synchronization, timing issues of Real time systems are explained with implementaion and verification aspects. The book is correct choice for learning, developing, real time systems with complete programming language Java.

Rating:
Summary: Exact description of Java on RTS's
Review: The programming language Java is widely used for web applications, servers, compilers. The concurrency aspect is also known to all of us. But for real time systems development in Java was awaited. I being a teacher of RTS course was looking for the language to introduce the real time system concepts. This book is correct solution. It starts with real time threading. Scheduling, Synchronization, timing issues of Real time systems are explained with implementaion and verification aspects. The book is correct choice for learning, developing, real time systems with complete programming language Java.