Compadres: a lightweight component middleware framework for composing distributed real-time embedded systems with real-time Java

  • Authors:

  • Jie Hu;Shruti Gorappa;Juan A. Colmenares;Raymond Klefstad

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 2007 International Conference on Middleware
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Component frameworks simplify development of enterprise systems and enable code reuse, but most frameworks are unpredictable and hence unsuitable for embedded or real-time systems. Similarly, Java is increasingly being used to build embedded system software because of its portability and ease of use. The Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) reduces the unpredictability in Java execution times by eliminating the need for a garbage collector. However, it introduces programming complexity that makes it difficult to build non-trivial applications. To bring the advantages of Java component development to DRE systems, while simultaneously simplifying the use of RTSJ, therefore, we have developed a new lightweight component model for RTSJ called Compadres. Compadres offers the following advantages: 1) Simple component definition in Java that abstracts away RTSJ memory management complexity; 2) System assembly from components by connecting ports that communicate through strongly-typed objects; 3) The Compadres compiler that automatically generates the scoped memory architecture for components, while the component framework handles communication between the components. To validate this work, we construct a non-trivial example application using the component framework, a simple real-time CORBA implementation. We then analyze the performance and efficiency of our component example versus a non-component example, RTZen. Our measurements show that our Compadres example built with components incurs only minor time overhead as compared to a comparable hand-coded example.