Refactoring Asynchronous Event Handling in the Real-Time Specification for Java

The primary goal for asynchronous event handling (AEH) in the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) is to have a lightweight concurrency mechanism. However the RTSJ neither provides a well-defined guideline on how to implement AEH nor requires the documentation of the AEH model used in the implementation. Also the AEH API in the RTSJ are criticized as lacking in configurability as they do not provide any means for programmers to have fine control over the AEH facilities, such as the mapping between real-time threads and handlers. For these reasons, it needs the refactoring of its application programming interface (API) to give programmers more configurability. This paper, therefore, proposes a set of AEH related classes and interfaces to enable flexible configurability over AEH components. We have implemented the refactored configurable AEH API using the new specifications on an existing RTSJ implementation and this paper shows that it allows more configurability for programmers than the current AEH API in the RTSJ does. Consequently programmers are able to specifically tailor the AEH subsystem to fit their applicationspsila particular needs.