Hard Real-Time

Stage 3 is the hard real-time extensions, and might occur after a number of iterations over stages 1 through 2. This stage involves the separation of MVM into two components — the graphical editor and the minimized runtime monitor.

Once the minimized runtime is split off, it will be vastly simplified. Hence, modifying only the runtime would leave the bulk of Flightdeck-UI code unchanged. Multiple implementations of the runtime could then be programmed with the same MVM graphical editor. In addition to a hard real-time version, another useful variant could be written in Jython (for use in Java applications and applets).

The approach of splitting MVM in the way described above allows the application to be used in many environments, while minimizing the amount of code that needs to change in order to adapt to each one. This is especially critical for hard real-time applications, because the number of bugs generally increases geometrically with code size. Thus, keeping the size of a hard real-time application small is very important for improving its reliability.