By William Fellows
Microsoft Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and the other Java forces which have locked horns with Sun Microsystems Inc’s over Java duly turned their ad hoc arrangement in the Real-Time Java Working Group into a legal entity called the J Consortium. By the summer they aim to have a polished API specification for real- time Java which they will offer up for standardization through a standards body which has not yet been chosen. The spec will be a parallel effort to the current RTJWG ‘stawman’ conceptual specification which has submitted to the National Committee for Information Technology Standardization’s (NCITS) R1 committee. NCITS has already voted against adopting a previous version of the specification. The tactical agenda of the J Consortium is the same as RTJWG except the members can now strike legally binding marketing and IP sharing and work cooperatively on PR and, they hope, branding. Other members of J Consortium include Aonix, NewMonics, Omron, Perennial and Plum Hall. Coactive Networks, Ericsson, FTL Systems, Navai Maritime AS (a division of Autronica), Octera Corp; TeleMedia Devices, Transvirtual Technologies, the US Diamond Exchange and Yokogawa Electric are said to have expressed their interest in joining. HP’s Wendy Fong is the J Consortium chairperson; Aonix’s Dave Wood gets the marketing brief. The Consortium is seeking to establish an open, portable Java extensions for the real-time and embedded systems communities. It claims Sun’s Java development process, the so- called Java Community Process, does not properly serve the real- time community.
