RTZen Funding FAQ


We are looking for industrial sponsors to help us finish RTZen - a Real-time CORBA ORB for RTSJ (real--time Java).

Here are some FAQ related to funding this effort:

  1. What licensing model do you intend to pursue?

    Similar to the TAO license - truely open-source and free to use without strings attached. RTZen will be open-source, free to use in any commercial application free without royalty or fee. RTZen will remain open-source, but companies can take the open-source RT ZEN and add value to make commercial version based on the open-source version without fee.

  2. Will there be commercial support for RTZen?

    Yes. Initially, our research group will support RTZen, but since RTZen is open-source, I am negotiating commercial support with a company that is currently providing commercial support for other open-source ORBs (e.g., TAO and JacORB).

  3. I need Value-Types and Portable Interceptors. Will these be given priority in RTZen?

    Many have expressed interest in having Value-Types and Portable Interceptors. Portable Intercepters and Value-types are already implemented in standard ZEN. Both will be available in the December '04 release of RTZen.

  4. What CORBA services will you provide?

    We have a few basic services coded for standard ZEN, such as Naming and Implementation Repository, Time, Event Service, which we will move to RTZen as we get to them. We can expidite any service you want if you are funding this work.

  5. What platforms will this be developed on?

    Currently it provides real-time predictability on TimeSys Linix compiled by TimeSys's RI, Purdue's Open Virtual Machine (OVM) which has both an interpreter and an ahead-of-time compiler , and Washington University's jRate. If you are donating and you are interested in a specific platform, we can make it a priority. VXWorks may be a bit of a problem since we don't have any licenses, but something can be worked out.

  6. What is your projected time of completion?

    Our goal is for RTZen to be usable in simple RT applications by December 2004. After that, we will spend about three years fleshing it out to provide the full RT CORBA specification guided by configuration to keep memory footprint appropriate to the application's needs. We will have new RTZen releases every 3 to 6 months as appropriate. The current bleeding version (source and executable) will be available via our web CVS repository.

  7. What advantages will I get for providing a support donation?

    We will give you acknowledgement for your donation as well as priority over what RT CORBA features and services we implement first.

  8. What is the level of funding you seek?

    Funding for a graduate student researcher costs $50k per year. I currently have a team of five graduate students, one professional programmer (Peter), and me working on RTZen. We plan to work hard for the next three years. The total cost is about $333,400 per year multiplied for three years totaling about $1,000,000. for the three year effort.

    We have a proven ZEN ORB core that is predictable when run on TimeSys Linux and jTime JVM (although the jTime JVM is currently very slow). We have also designed ZEN so that the application developer is shielded from most of the complexity of using RTSJ (real-time Java). We have also developed techniques for configuration and feature subsetting that enable shrinking the memory footprint of ZEN to be proportional to the features used by the application.

    We plan regular (6 month) releases along the way which will each provide a usable subset of RT CORBA specification. Our goal is to implement the full specification for Real-time CORBA in RTSJ along with real-time versions of the CORBA services.

    Our funding for RTZen ended December 31, 2004. At this time we are still seeking funding for RTZen.