Lockheed Martin Selects Aonix PERC for Aegis Weapon System

Aonix is pleased to announce that Lockheed Martin has selected the Aonix PERC Ultra® virtual machine (VM) for the Aegis Weapon System Open Architecture Program. The Aegis Open Architecture team aims to enhance the capabilities and service life of the U.S. Navy's premier surface combat system while also reducing its cost. To help achieve these goals, Lockheed Martin selected the Aonix PERC VM based on its ability to provide deterministic, real-time performance and high productivity development.

The Lockheed Martin Aegis team was faced with programming language selection for its Open Architecture Program. Java™ was selected for several critical subsystems due to its superior tool and library support along with its superior productivity and portability. However, traditional Java offerings could not meet the challenge of the critical timing requirements for the Aegis project. In contrast to its competitors, PERC Ultra, with its deterministic capabilities and ahead-of-time compilation, offered Lockheed Martin the responsiveness it needed to meet its most demanding timing requirements. In addition to real-time threading and deterministic garbage collection, PERC Ultra provided the instrumentation and VM management tools necessary to support the mission-critical real-time requirements of the Aegis Weapon System.

The Lockheed Martin-developed Aegis Weapon System is the world's premier naval defense system and the sea-based element of the United States' Ballistic Missile Defense System. The Aegis Weapon System is a radar and missile system seamlessly integrated with its own command and control system, capable of simultaneous operation defending against advanced air, surface and subsurface threats.

Currently, Aegis Weapon System capabilities are on 80 cruisers, destroyers and frigates on station around the world, with more than 25 under construction or planned. In addition to the U.S. Navy, Aegis is the primary naval surface weapon system for Japan, Spain, Norway, Korea and Australia.

PERC Selected for FKI Logistex BOSS Material Handling Control System

FKI Logistex®, a global leader in integrated material handling solutions, has selected the Aonix PERC Ultra virtual machine to implement the Human Machine Interface (HMI) of their BOSS™ material handling control system. The BOSS HMI provides its users with real-time system status, alarms and performance information. The standard BOSS HMI also includes extensive diagnostics, data collection/logging functions and productivity-monitoring tools to keep the system running at peak performance.

“FKI Logistex chose to write the BOSS HMI in J2SE Java™ for the language’s safety, security, reusability, and scalability. Our search for a reliable Java virtual machine ended with the selection of PERC Ultra,” said Jason Johnson, Manager of Controls and Software Development at FKI Logistex. “We chose PERC for its deterministic performance, real-time attributes, and excellent customer support.”

FKI Logistex and BOSS are trademarks or registered trademarks of  FKI Logistex.  Java™ and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Boeing Selects Aonix ObjectAda for Tomahawk Cruise Missle Mission Planning Software

As a historical leader in mission critical Ada technologies, Aonix is pleased to announce the selection of ObjectAda by Boeing for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile program. Boeing plans to use Aonix’s ObjectAda for Windows for ongoing software development and for migration tasks on the Tomahawk Mission Planning (TMP) Software Platform. Boeing’s interest in Aonix’s ObjectAda for Windows hinges on several technical factors, including its full compatibility with Microsoft’s .NET platform.

Facing legacy obsolescence and diminishing support for their existing Ada development environment, Boeing’s TMP group initiated a full-scale evaluation of available Ada compiler and tool solutions. Their challenge was to find an Ada vendor with compiler technology able to support a very large Ada source code base, meet stringent performance and functionality requirements, and efficiently support a large software development team. In order to port a large code base without requiring a large investment of new engineering resources, Boeing’s TMP group needed a multilanguage development environment to accommodate existing C, Fortran, and .NET software assets.

 “Aonix rose to all the challenges we laid out,” noted Dan Turpin, TMP Systems Engineer. “They accommodated specific requirements critical to our success, such as performing specific debugger and compiler performance improvements that we needed.”

Similarly, Ben Ralston, TMP’s compiler technical evaluator, stated, “As an engineer, I realize it was no small feat to accomplish technical changes of this magnitude to their compiler, especially in such a short time frame. Aonix met all of our objectives.”

In integrating current Windows improvements with the Aonix Ada 95 compiler, Aonix has delivered enhancements to the object code and symbolic debugging information generation and provided full compatibility with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 development tools. Recognizing the growing number of large-scale Ada projects, ObjectAda for Windows offers dramatic performance improvements  for developers linking executable files or initiating debugging sessions for large programs. As part of the ObjectAda family, ObjectAda for Windows allows developers to choose between the traditional Aonix IDE for development and the new AonixADT™ Eclipse plug-in. AonixADT incorporates Ada-project awareness, an Ada-language sensitive editor, Ada-language compile and build capabilities, and a complete Ada debugger interface, enabling Ada developers to enjoy state-of-the-art interface capabilities geared to maximize developer ease and efficiency.