Esterel Meets Java: Building Reactive Synchronous Programs in Java

Esterel is a mature reactive language used to specify and implement realtime and time-critical systems. In this article, we investigate its use with Java and describe a Java binding for Esterel. We show that Esterel programs translate and integrate well into Java. The real-time, critical part of the code can be specified with Esterel and verified with a large set of tools, before being turned into a Java class. We believe embedded Java applications should adopt this kind of marriage to achieve a high level of reliability without sacrificing the comfort of the language and its environment, despite the limitations of Java in term of real-time support.