A New Era of Productivity and Reliability

As we embark on a new year, we face new challenges in our evolving world. In the realm of mission critical software, 2007 offers the promise of great strides not only in our management of  important legacy systems, but also in our approach to the development of critical new systems.

Every day, more and more of your competitors are facing the reality that C and C++ cannot meet the future challenges of critical software development, either in terms of reliability, quality, and safety, or in terms of productivity and affordability. More systems built this way will fail from a technical or business viewpoint, or both.

Java™ is an emerging key to the future of mission critical computing. As has been amply proven in the domain of desktop and enterprise computing, Java cuts the cost of software development in half and reduces the cost of maintenance 5 to 10 fold, while at the same time providing much greater quality and stability than C/C++ software. Java programs scale up far better as well. This is a key factor to maintaining a competitive edge in the face of the exponential increases in software size and complexity. Ask yourself: even if you are managing your software complexity today, will you still be able to do so 2, 3, or 5 years from now? If you are using C or C++, increasingly the answer is “no”. Securing tomorrow requires action today.

Aonix has been hard at work creating the foundation for your software future, and those efforts are now paying off for you. As a key thought leader in real-time and embedded Java technologies since the inception of the idea as part of the NIST requirements efforts in 1995, and participation in the subsequent founding technology efforts of the Real-Time Java Working Group and J Consortium, Aonix is uniquely positioned to provide ground-breaking technologies for Java developers. Our Java expertise is a perfect fit on top of our two and a half decades of leadership in productive and reliable mission critical technologies, beginning with the introduction of commercial Ada compilers from one of our founders, Jean Ichbiah, the creator of the Ada language.

Speaking of Ada, our latest release of ObjectAda and the new ADT Eclipse plug-ins provides new levels of Ada vitality for supporting thousands of Ada developers and tens of millions of lines of extant Ada software being used on some of the most critical applications in operation today. Ada is and remains one of the premier technologies for the development of high integrity and safety critical software.

2007 will bring new advancements for both Java and Ada developers. PERC Ultra, featuring the industry-leading virtual machine, is now available with Java 5 language support to compliment its predictable real-time garbage collection and reliable real-time threading. PERC Pico technology, in pre-commercial release since January 2006, is now approaching first commercial shipment. PERC Pico brings Java developers firmly into the fold of hard real-time development, with footprint and performance comparable to C and C++ applications while retaining Java safety and productivity advantages. For Ada developers, 2007 will bring several important new product releases, expanded RTOS platforms, and increasing levels of Ada 2005 capabilities, along with our complementary ADT Ada Eclipse interface.

This issue of AoNews gives you some examples of how these new and expanding technologies are making it possible to keep up with the expansion of software cost and complexity. We hope you will join us as we continue to track “The Leading Edge of Real-Time and Embedded Solutions” in this exciting new year. 

We hope you enjoy our new online newsletter format, which allows us to bring you news in a more timely manner without killing a lot of trees. If you have any comments or suggestions, we'd love to here from you. Email us at: editor@aonixnews.com.