Towards a mobile code management environment for complex, real-time, distributed systems

We present a novel mobile code management environment, currently under design and development. Our design employs an open architecture, suitable for "plug-and-play" with COTS and other groups' tools. While we have studied new algorithms, cost and objective functions, and other fundamental issues, the main contribution of this experimental research work is in the environment itself. It should be noted that networked platforms, such as the World Wide Web, are inherently not suitable for traditional, predictable real-time applications. Thus, real-time concerns necessarily need to be blended with others concerns, and the target applications, making use of our environment, will too be a blend of partially hard real-time and partially (or mostly) soft-real-time ones. The prototype environment will therefore support performance-based analysis and management focusing not only on predictability but also on compilation, efficiency, safety and other tradeoffs. We have selected the Java language and its bytecode format as a representation for mobile code as well as a language for our implementation.