Sun Microsystems Inc says it has now completed the 1.0 version of its EmbeddedJava specification, and shipped the development release of the product out to its licensees. The commercial release is expected before the end of the year, Sun said at this week’s Embedded Systems show in San Jose, California. But the crucial real-time extensions, along with support for Sun’s yet- to-be-announced Jini Java networking technology, must wait until the following release of the product. No date was given for its release. Real-time extensions have been the subject of a major row between Sun and Hewlett-Packard Co, which along with Microsoft Corp and 13 others is now working on an alternative set of real-time extensions for the embedded market. HP said it had become dissatisfied at the pace with which Microsoft was evolving its plans. Sun, however, claims that its new release will enable device manufacturers to ship small footprint, dedicated function products next year, and lists pagers, printers, industrial controllers, office peripherals, test and measurement equipment and network routers and switches as among the first likely targets. The EmbeddedJava virtual machine fits into 256Kb of ROM memory, and developers can pick just the class libraries they need for a particular device. Sun has nine real-time operating system licensees who plan to integrate EmbeddedJava in with their own products, including Acorn Computer Ltd, Geoworks Corp, Lucent Technologies Inc, Mentor Graphics Inc’s Microtec division, Microware Systems Inc, Motorola Inc, QNX Software Inc, Hillsboro, Oregon-based US Software Corp and Wind River Systems Inc. Sun’s own Chorus division will also use EmbeddedJava. Motorola says it has already ported EmbeddedJava to its M.Core microprocessors, the first in the industry, it claims. The initial port sits on top of Motorola’s own RTEK operating system, and Motorola says it will make an instructional porting guide available to other real- time operating systems that support both EmbeddedJava and M.Core – namely Microtek, Microware and Wind River – in the first quarter of next year.
