65/2009 : A Hardware Abstraction Layer in Java

RR Number

65/2009

Comment

accepted for publication

Conference

Trans. on Embedded Computing Sys.

Author(s)

Martin Schoeberl, Stephan Korsholm, Tomas Kalibera, Anders P. Ravn

Abstract

Embedded systems use specialized hardware devices to interact with their environment, and since they have to be dependable, it is attractive to use a modern, type-safe programming language like Java to develop programs for them. Standard Java, as a platform independent language, delegates access to devices, direct memory access, and interrupt handling to some underlying operating system or kernel, but in the embedded systems domain resources are scarce and a Java virtual machine (JVM) without an underlying middleware is an attractive architecture. The contribution of this paper is a proposal for Java packages with hardware objects and interrupt handlers that interface to such a JVM. We provide implementations of the proposal directly in hardware, as extensions of standard interpreters, and finally with an operating system middleware. The latter solution is mainly seen as a migration path allowing Java programs to coexist with legacy system components. An important aspect of the proposal is that it is compatible with the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ).

Bibtex

@ARTICLE{jop:tecs:jhal,
  author = {Martin Schoeberl and Stephan Korsholm and Tomas Kalibera and Anders
	P. Ravn},
  title = {A Hardware Abstraction Layer in {Java}},
  journal = {Trans. on Embedded Computing Sys.},
  year = {2009},
  volume = {accepted},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  issn = {1539-9087},
  publisher = {ACM},
  url = {http://www.jopdesign.com/doc/jhal.pdf}
}

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