AN OVERVIEW OF REALTIMETALK, A DESIGN FRAMEWORK FOR REAL-TIME SYSTEMS

RealTimeTalk (RTT) is a design framework for developing distributed re al-time applications with both hard and soft requirements. The framewo rk supports design via hierarchical decomposition. We believe that obj ect-orientation is the best way to go about structuring a problem, hen ce the RTT language is based on Smalltalk with an analysis frontend to infer type information for run-time safety, and to yield more precise estimations of execution times. Unlike most real-time systems, RTT do es not force the designer to embed constructs for timing requirements, communication, and synchronization in the code. Rather, such informat ion is specified on a higher level of abstraction using graphical tool s. This not only keeps the code ''clean'' but also simplifies timing a nalysis and resource allocation. A comparison with other real-time sys tems concludes the paper. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.