Developing NASA's mission software with Java
jaxenter.com
jaxenter.com
This policy seems dubious to me. It forces the teams to roll their own immature versions of things rather than rely on heavily used (and thus heavily battle-tested) 3rd party libraries. (Any special code screening applied to internal code could also be applied to open-source 3rd party code too).
To be fair I worked with netbeans as well for a while and definitely like it better than eclipse. never tried Java FX because Swing is so convenient once you get the hang of the layout managers and you can drop to Graphics2D anyway for everything else.
That's not true. I've used real-time Java -- as have Boeing, Raytheon and NASA, though not necessarily the projects discussed here -- for hard realtime, safety-critical defense projects. We've certainly used it for soft-realitime mission control a lot, where it has replaced pretty much all legacy C++/Ada.
Realtime Java is used even for embedded, hard realtime application like avionics. See here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4051966/which-real-time-r...
There is interesting activity in that area now with the ongoing work on RTSJ 2.0: https://www.aicas.com/cms/en/rtsj (also here: http://www.javaworld.com/article/2906981/java-app-dev/little...)
> Java FX was convenient for data visualization
Was? They clearly gush over it and mention that they are replacing legacy systems with Java - without specifying 'data visualization' as the only use.
"At the FDF [Flight Dynamics Facility] we’ve been using Java for all of our new application development, and intend to continue doing so".
> mission control and other realtime stuff definitely not java.
"Definitely" is your interjection. "JavaFX [..] start out as ‘nice to have’s, the usefulness quickly becomes apparent in the operations environment. Before long, JavaFX becomes a first class citizen in the ground system software."
They seem to be happy with it and not precluding any particular uses.
You should have a look at JSR-000302 Safety Critical Java Technology. No GC, realtime, direct hardware access and certified for DO-178B, Level A.
>The specification is targeted to a wide variety of very demanding certification paradigms such as the safety-critical requirements of DO-178B, Level A. This specification presents a set of Java classes providing for safety-critical application startup, concurrency, scheduling, synchronization, input/output, memory management, timer management, interrupt processing, native interfaces, and exceptions.To enhance the certifiability of applications constructed to conform to this specification, this specification also presents a set of annotations that can be used to permit static checking for applications to guarantee that the application exhibits certain safety properties.
Additionally, the article is about how:
>Four of NASA’s top engineers explain the role that Java, JavaFX and NetBeans play in NASA’s space missions.
Hardly what I would call product placement.