Descriptive names are crucial to understand code. However, good names are notoriously hard to choose and manually changing a globally visible name can be a maintenance nightmare. Hence, tool support for automated renaming is an essential aid for developers and widely supported by popular development environments.

The JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler is a high quality Java compiler that is easy to extend in order to build static analysis tools for Java, and to extend Java with new language constructs. It is built modularly, with a Java 1.4 compiler that is extended to a Java 5 compiler. Example applications that are built as extensions include an alternative backend that generates Jimple, an extension of Java with AspectJ constructs, and the implementation of a pluggable type system for non-null checking and inferenc.

The Java programming language, being a portable and safe object-oriented language, has gained much interest among embedded and real-time systems developers. However, standard Java implementations exhibit problems with performance, memory footprint, and predictability. The question is then, are these limitations inherent in the technology?Reviewing run-time aspects and the possibility to compile Java to native code, reveals some real limitations as well as common misconceptions. Investigation of the real limitations shows that for implementing real-time Java on small embedded platforms, native compilation via C is an appropriate solution for many platforms and applications.A revised technique for Java-compatible memory management is proposed to reduce latencies, and linkage of externally generated (C) code with natively compiled Java is considered in a prototype that has been implemented. Based on application demands and experimental verification, we find that real-time Java can, and should, retain the standard simple Java memory model to the programmer.

As embedded systems become more and more complex, and the time to market becomes shorter, there is a need in the embedded systems community to find better programming languages that let the programmers develop correct code faster. The programming languages used today, typically C and/or Assemblers, are just too error-prone. The Java technology has therefore gained a lot of interest from developers of embedded systems in the last few years. We propose an approach based on compiling Java into native machine code via C as an intermediate language. The C code generation process should also add close interaction with a fully pre-emptive incremental garbage collector and a small and efficient real time kernel. Tests performed on a small 8-bit microprocessor show that it is possible to use a modern object oriented language with automatic memory management, such as Java, and yet generate fully predictable code that can be run in very small devices with severe memory constraints.