Towards language support for component-oriented real-time programming

Component-oriented programming promises to finally make the vision of pervasive software components a reality. In the area of dependable real-time systems, the benefits of increased reuse, reliability, and efficiency make component-oriented programming especially attractive. As part of the Lagoona project, we are investigating how component-oriented programming can be supported at the level of programming languages. Recently, we have also become interested in supporting the construction of real-time systems within the Lagoona framework, and we have started exploring the language design space for this domain. We outline the design of the experimental programming language Lagoona and discuss two of its novel features in more detail. We also discuss the difficulties we see for integrating the ideas of component-oriented programming with the requirements of real-time systems. It is our hope that feedback from the workshop will enable us to more clearly define a research agenda in this area.