Going Real Time

by Paul Harmon

Traditionally, there has been a rather sharp distinction between conventional enterprise applications and real-time applications. Regular applications were sometimes expected to provide answers to queries rather quickly, but everyone distinguished between "quick responses" and the kind of responses that were required by process control systems. If you want to automate an oil refinery or incorporate feedback systems in a space shuttle and you expect that hundreds or thousands of parts of a second will make the difference between an effective system and one that destroys a billion-dollar refinery or a space shuttle, you tend to think about the world differently. Traditionally, real-time process control systems use special hardware and special programming languages, or Assembler, to eliminate any unnecessary interpretation.