The Slot Car Programming Challenge will do more than let coders experience the thrill of playing with 1960’s era toys; it offers the chance for people to learn more about the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ).
RTSJ looks like a Myers-Briggs test result, but it stands for a Java technology that has proven challenging to some developers.
Sun’s Distinguished Engineer Greg Bollella outlined how Sun will overcome the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding RTSJ – They’re going to let programmers race little cars around a track. Quite frankly, more of the world’s problems should be solved this way.
Bollella explained in his interview on Sun’s site how RTSJ addresses controlling physical devices and the three factors involved with doing so: sensing, control, and actuation.
“With RTSJ, you have to pay explicit attention to memory consumption and object creation in a particular memory area so that you don’t get exceptions,” Bollella said of a common challenge to programmers.
His work and that of others focuses on making those RTSJ implementations easier to use. But even the most well-crafted application will give up some of its average throughput performance.
The new challenge for Sun is getting programmers to do more with RTSJ and increase the number of those adopting it for real world use. At the JavaOne Conference beginning May 16th, Sun will build a race track for 1/24 scale cars and coders will write programs to run those cars quickly through the track. Bollella explained more about the Slot Car Challenge:
We are going to install about 100-200 feet of track and embed the track with 200 sensors. The program can detect whether or not the car is over a sensor, but it can’t tell which sensor. All the sensors will be merged together. Developers who enter the Challenge have to write a polling loop that gathers the sensor data and continually monitors whether the car is over a sensor.
Then the program gives the car the appropriate voltage so that it goes fast on the straight-aways and slow on the curves. Contestants will write the code in the labs and bring it to the track where we run it on a machine. We’ll be keeping time as the car goes from the start to finish line. The 10 best times at the end of the Conference all get prizes.
So the Challenge isn’t just about going fast, but knowing when to slow down, and how to program that to move the car around the track in the quickest time. “The Slot Car Challenge at the 2006 JavaOne Conference will prove that anyone can program with RTSJ,” Bollella said.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
