The Java Real-Time System

Today I attended the final event of the year for the New York Java Special Interest Group, aka the NY JavaSIG, on the topic of real-time Java.

Looks like with the improvements in Java performance, more and more firms are starting to use Java technology to implement more and more of their critical software, and thereby realizing developmental productivity gains over more traditional C/C++ development. The problem is time-critical systems have no guarantee that, at any instant in time, the process will not be interrupted by the Java Garbage Collector, or other higher-priority processes. That's where the Java Real-Time System comes in.


The presentation was given by Eric Bruno of Sun Microsystems.
A couple of articles of interest written by Eric that he noted on this topic were:
1. Go Inside the Java Real-Time System
2. Java RTS Real-Time Enables Financial Applications

One special note for me was that the event was held at Google's NY Sales & Engineering Office on the 4th floor so this provided me the opportunity to look first hand at the work environment at Google. It looked like the entire place was in a loft on one large floor. Very cool.