Authors

Authors of the first edition

Greg Bollella, a Distinguished Engineer and Principle Investigator for Real-Time Java at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, was the founding Spec Lead for the RTSJ while a Senior Architect at IBM. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation research is in real-time scheduling theory and real-time systems implementation.

Ben Brosgol is a senior technical staff member of Ada Core Technologies, Inc. He has had a long involvement with programming language design and implementation, focusing on Ada and real-time support, and has been providing Java-related services since 1997. Ben holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a B.A. from Amherst College.

Peter Dibble, was the Senior Scientist at Microware Systems Corporation throughout the initial design of the RTSJ and nearly to the final publication of the 1.0 version of the RTSJ. At Microware he designed, coded, and analyzed system software for real-time systems for more than twelve years and as part of Microware's Java team, Peter was involved with the Java Virtual Machine since early 1997. He has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from University of Rochester.

Steve Furr currently works for QNX Software Systems, where he was responsible for Java technologies for the QNX Neutrino Operating System. He graduated from Simon Fraser University with a B.Sc. in computer science.

James Gosling, a Fellow at Sun Microsystems, is the originator of the Java programming language. His career in programming started by developing real-time software for scientific instrumentation. He has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University and a B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Calgary.

David Hardin, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of aJile Systems, has worked in safety-critical computer systems architecture, formal methods, and custom microprocessor design at Rockwell Collins, and was named a Rockwell Engineer of the Year for 1997. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Kansas State University.

Mark Turnbull has been an employee of Nortel Networks since 1983. Most of his experience has been in the area of proprietary language design, compiler design, and real-time systems.

Rudy Belliardi is a Consulting Engineer, Advanced Technology at Schneider Automation. He has designed and implemented systems, languages and protocols for factory automation and for the medical field. He holds a Doctor in electronic engineering from the University of Genova and an Applied Scientist Professional degree in computer science from the George Washington University.

Authors of the second edition

The bulk of the work on this version of the specification divided among the active members of the RTSJ Technical Interpretation Committee. The modifications were negotiated with Peter Dibble, then checked and approved by the entire group. Although each author has particular responsibility for certain chapters, the entire specification is a joint work. The major contributors are listed here.

Rudy Belliardi is a Consulting Engineer, Advanced Technology at Schneider Automation. He has designed and implemented systems, languages and protocols for factory automation and for the medical field. He is actively involved in industrial real-time communications efforts. He holds a Doctor in electronic engineering from the University of Genova and an Applied Scientist Professional degree in computer science from the George Washington University. He was the primary contributor for the Time and Clocks and Timers chapters.

Ben Brosgol is a senior technical staff member of Ada Core Technologies, Inc. He has had a long involvement with programming language design and implementation, focusing on Ada and real-time support, and has been providing Java-related services since 1997. Ben holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a B.A. from Amherst College. He was the primary contributor for the Synchronization chapter.

Peter Dibble, Distinguished Engineer at TimeSys, is on the team that implemented and now supports the RTSJ reference implementation, the RTSJ technology conformance kit, and the first commercial implementation of the RTSJ. He acted as the technical lead for RTSJ spec interpretation and maintenance since TimeSys assumed the RTSJ maintenance lead role, and moved to Maintenance Lead late in the process. He served as editor for this edition, was the primary contributor to the Memory chapter, and was part of the team for the scheduling and threads chapters.

David Holmes is Director and Chief Scientist of DLTeCH Pty Ltd, located in Brisbane, Australia. His work with Java technology has focused on concurrency and synchronization support in the language and virtual machine and he is currently working on a real-time Java virtual machine. David is a member of the expert group for JSR-166 "Concurrency Utilities" being developed under the Java Community Process, and co-author of "The Java Programming Language" - third and fourth editions. David completed his Ph.D. at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1999, in the area of synchronization within object-oriented systems. He was such an intense and useful critic of the 1.0 RTSJ Spec and throughout this revision that the other authors asked him to help with this revision. He helped improve the specification everywhere, but contributed particularly heavily to the scheduling chapter.

Andy Wellings is Professor of Real-Time Systems in the Department of Computer Science, University of York, U.K. His research interests are focused on two related areas of computing: the design, use and implementation of real-time programming languages and operating systems; and the design and use of general purpose distributed operating systems. Professor Wellings has published over 100 technical papers and reports, including five textbooks. He teaches courses in Operating Systems, Real-Time Systems and Networks and Distributed Systems. He was a primary contributor to the Asynchrony chapter, and part of the team for the scheduling and threads chapters.

Other Contributors

Countless people have contributed to the RTSJ, but several are have committed so many hours to the effort that they stand out even in this hard-working group:

Peter Haggar, Senior Software Engineer at IBM, and a distinguished member of the Java community, assumed the role of RTSJ Spec Lead at IBM when Greg Bollella moved to Sun Microsystems. He saw the spec through public review and approval by the JCP Executive Committee, then handed the Maintenance Lead role to Doug Locke at TimeSys. He has a B.S in Computer Science from Clarkson University.

C. Douglass Locke, was Vice President of Technology at TimeSys, and Maintenance Lead for the RTSJ during most of the work on this specification. He managed the reference implementation and technology conformance kit projects at TimeSys for most of their progress. He has a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University and has worked in embedded real-time since computers ran from punch boards. Doug is currently an independent consultant.

The team that implemented the reference implementation contributed greatly to the specification. First, they separated the expert group's dreams from implementable reality. Second, by supplying an implementation that we could use, they uncovered serious problems with usability. Third, they became experts in the details of the specification and helped thrash out the final modifications to scoped memory and asynchronous transfer of control.

Three RI engineers stand out for their contributions: Dionisio deNizVillasenor Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University, Scott Robbins BS in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, and Pratik Solanki M.Sc. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Alden Dima and the National Institute of Standards and Technology has supported the RTSJ mailing lists for years. This is nearly invisible support work, but it is important and we appreciate it.