Nearly 13 billion embedded devices will ship in 2013, more than eight times the number of general purpose computers. Unlike general purpose computers, these embedded devices will deploy on a broad diversity of distinct processor architectures and operating systems. The application software for each embedded device is almost always custom tailored if not written entirely from scratch. And the size of typical embedded system software applications is growing exponentially from year to year, with many of today's embedded systems comprised of multiple millions of lines of code. For all of these reasons, the software portability, reuse, and modular composability benefits offered by the Java language are especially valuable to developers of embedded systems. Both embedded and general purpose software frequently need to comply with real-time constraints, even more so in recent years due to the growing popularity of voice and gesture user interfaces, audio and video streaming, and real-time gaming applications. Although Java features good software engineering characteristics, traditional Java virtual machine implementations are unsuitable for deploying real-time software due to under specification of thread scheduling and synchronization semantics, unclear demand and utilization of memory and CPU resources, and unpredictable interference associated with automatic garbage collection and adaptive compilation. Higher-level programming languages and middleware are needed to robustly and productively design, implement, compose, integrate, validate, and enforce memory and real-time constraints along with conventional functional requirements for reusable software components. It is essential that the production of real-time embedded systems take advantage of languages, tools, and methods that enable higher software productivity. The Java programming language has become an attractive choice because of its safety, productivity, its relatively low maintenance costs, and the availability of well trained developers.