A new draft of the Real-Time Java Ad Hoc Group’s so-called ‘straw man’ specification got an airing at a meeting of the National Committee for Information Technology Standardization’s (NCITS) R1 committee last week. About ten companies met and agreed the spec is heading in the right direction. NCITS has already turned down one application to adopt a Real-Time Working Group spec for standardization. At the same time, the activity of Doug Jensen’s ad hoc group investigating distributed real-time Java technologies has been put on hold. He doesn’t consider it fruitful to continue the effort until Sun is able to cooperate in the effort and Sun is currently too busy with other interests to give this the attention he believes it requires. In the meantime, the Real-Time Java expert group formed under Sun’s community source development program and lead by IBM Corp’s Greg Bollella insists it is starting with a clean slate and is not setting out with prior art.