A proposal for further specifying the behavior of the Java threading system is presented in this paper. The current standard is the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ), which was published in 2000. Nilsen believes that the standard under-specifies the behavior of the Java threading system, hence reducing the widespread acceptance of Java as a real-time programming language.

It is hard to argue with the author’s specifications. Nilsen forms a reasonable proposal that is still within the original RTSJ specification, and yet I’m unconvinced that these changes are necessary. It will be up to the Java community to decide if Java will indeed be intended for use in real-time applications, and, further, if the proposed updates to the specification are critical to that effort.

Read this paper if you are interested in the notion of threading. The most interesting portion of this paper is the merging of Java threads with native operating system (OS) threading. This paper presents a reasonably simple design pattern that integrates the two so that programs can maintain real-time requirements while still accessing non-real-time services.