Can real-time software engineering be taught to Java programmers?

Abstract

For several years we have been watching with envy as specialist labs are developed for multimedia students, which together with software licenses, are now costing upwards of $5,000 per seat. We would like to be able to offer as rich a learning experience for our software engineers who study a final year module on real-time software engineering. In persisting with our students' main taught programming language of Java we argue that it is still possible to demonstrate the issues of software development for real-time systems whilst also offering realistic and rewarding practical work. Although the real-time community is still largely working in C, we believe we can educate the real-time developers of the future, and we use, as leverage for this, the ever growing body of reported work in making Java technology more suitable for time critical and embedded systems development. We present our case for a relevant real-time undergraduate laboratory based around Java.