The distributed real-time specification for Java: an initial proposal

Work has begun on the Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java, as part of Sun's Java Community Process. This paper summarizes some ideas about an initial approach to the specification. The approach is based on providing a natural and minimal mechanistic extension to Remote Method invocation (RM I) to support the end-to-end timeliness (and other) properties of distribut ed - in the sense of transnode - behaviors. These timeliness properties mus t be preserved for any distributed real-time computing system, regardless o f its application programming model - whether RPC, mobile objects, or whate ver. in particular, the proposed extension facilitates writing real-time di stributed Java programs using a distributable threads programming abstracti on very similar to that of the OMG proposed specification for Dynamic Sched uling Real-Time CORBA.