Overview
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Over 90 percent of all microprocessors are now used for real-time and
embedded applications, and the behavior of many of these applications
is constrained by the physical world. Higher-level programming
languages and middleware are needed to robustly and productively
design, implement, compose, integrate, validate, and enforce
real-time constraints along with conventional functional requirements
and reusable components. It is essential that the production of
real-time embedded systems can take advantage of languages, tools,
and methods that enable higher software productivity. The Java
programming language has become an attractive choice because of its
safety, productivity, its relatively low maintenance costs, and the
availability of well trained developers.

Although it features good software engineering characteristics,
standard Java is unsuitable for developing real-time embedded
systems, mainly due to under-specification of thread scheduling and
the presence of garbage collection. These problems are addressed by
the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ). The intent of this
specification is the development of real-time applications by
providing several additions such as extending the Java memory model
and providing stronger semantics in thread scheduling.

Interest in real-time Java in both the research community and
industry has recently increased significantly, because of its
challenges and its potential impact on the development of embedded
and real-time applications. The goal of the proposed workshop is to
gather researchers working on real-time and embedded Java to identify
the challenging problems that still need to be solved in order to
assure the success of real-time Java as a technology, and to report
results and experiences gained by researchers.

This year following two topics are of special interest:

* Open source solutions
* Multiprocessor and distributed real-time Java

Open source software and hardware solutions have received growing
attention in recent years; major vendors of Java technology have
adopted the open source development model for some of their products.
Open source development benefits from distributed peer review and
transparency and enables easy verification of published results.
Access to the source code also stimulates building upon prior work,
as it allows to reuse tested and reviewed components.

Nowadays, real-time systems demand more functionality than in
previous years. Consequently the execution platforms are often
multiprocessors or distributed systems. Although the Real-Time
Specification for Java has addressed some multiprocessor issues,
other issues are still outstanding. Furthermore, defining the
appropriate RTSJ abstractions for distributed real-time programming
is still an open topic. One day of the workshop will be designated
for multiprocessor and distributed systems issues with papers, panels
and invited presentations.