Their technologies come to market while a dispute has emerged in the embedded community over the development of a real-time Java standard. However, that conflict is separate from and does not impact this week's announcements from the two companies.

At the Embedded Systems Conference today (Nov. 3), Sun revealed that the code for its EmbeddedJava software is essentially completed. Sun already has at least nine licensees in the real-time operating systems (RTOS) community planning to take the technology, interface it to their own RTOS, and offer the combination to developers.

EmbeddedJava is billed by Sun as a highly configurable environment for deeply embedded applications. Sun said it has shipped a final beta release of the code to its licensees and expects products based on the technology to hit the market next year.

Sun's EmbeddedJava licensees include Acorn, Chorus (now owned by Sun), Geoworks, Lucent Technologies, Mentor Graphic's Microtec division, Microware Systems, Motorola, QNX Software, US Software and Wind River Systems.

HP effort
Separately at ESC, HP revealed that it will make its competing embedded Java virtual machine technology — first announced this past April — widely available as part of a product family called "Chai."

HP's technology has previously been licensed by real-time operating system vendors Integrated Systems, Lynx Real-Time Systems, Microware and QNX. In addition, Wind River has endorsed, but hasn't formally licensed, the HP technology.

HP announced additional licensees of its technology at this week's conference. Microware Systems Corp. plans to port the Chai virtual machine to its Ariel RTOS. QNX used the conference to demonstrate the Chai VM running on its Neutrino RTOS. In addition, European vendor Enea OSE Systems has licensed the HP offering.

In addition, Siemens has licensed the Chai VM for use in its industrial automation systems.