An RTPA supporting environment for Java code generation

Real-time software development from formal specifications requires tools and suitable supporting environments to facilitate the development process. The need for such tools becomes more pronounced if the development language is Java; because Java suffers from the unpredictable behavior of the garbage collector. This paper presents a supporting environment for developing real-time software using Java from formal specifications in RTPA. The supporting environment has two major components: a real-time support library that provides extended real-time library functions for the generated Java code, and a real-time kernel (RTOS+) that provides efficient real-time services to the system. By automatically generating Java code from formal specifications, the programmer is relieved of the burden of interpreting the specification before writing code in Java and at the same time is able to take advantage to develop real-time applications in Java under the support of the real-time support environment.