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Real-time operating system (RTOS) designers have succeeded at certifying respective operating systems to the Federal Aviation Administration's DO-178B safety certification standard, but certifying real-time Java to DO-178B still has challenges.
"DO-178B has not offered a straightforward path for certifying Java or any other object-oriented code," says Nat Hillary, field applications engineer at LDRA Software Technology in San Bruno, Calif. DO-178C offers guidance for certifying object-oriented code to the DO-178C standard. The maturity of Java for embedded devices and the soon-to-be-released standard offered good timing for LDRA to announce a Java version of its tool suite.
"Boeing and Airbus have both publicly stated that certification costs are becoming exorbitantly high," Hillary says. "The only way for the industry to reduce this increasingly excessive cost factor is by better management of the software development process. Java offers many time-savings features as...