A new Java Thread model for concurrent programming of real-time systems

Abstract

The Java ™ Virtual Machine (JVM) provides a high degree of platform independence, but being an interpreter, Java has a poor system performance. New compiler techniques and Java processors will gradually improve the performance of Java, but despite these developments, Java is still far from real-time. We propose the Communicating Java Threads (CJT) model, which eliminates several shortcomings, such as Java's non-deterministic behavior, Java's monitor weakness, and lack of reactiveness for real-time and embedded systems. CJT is based on CSP providing channels, composition constructs, and scheduling of processes. The CJT Java class library, which provides all necessary classes on top of Java, is readily available to interested users. The main power of the method is that it integrates these features in a natural way and in no way conflicts with other paradigms, such as PersonalJava ™, EmbeddedJava ™, JavaBeans ™, CORBA, and PVM. All activities, reported in this paper, are carried out as part of the JavaPP project