Hardware Objects

From JopWiki

Hardware objects are objects that represent IO devices. The intention of hardware objects is a safe and efficient access to low-level devices from Java.

Representing IO devices as first class objects has following benefits:

• Object-oriented: An object for a device is the most natural integration into an OO language

• Safe: The safety of Java is not compromised. We can access only those device registers that are represented by the class definition

• Efficient Device access is performed by single bytecodes getfield and putfield. We can avoid expensive native calls to C

[edit] Example

Following code defines a HW object for a serial port:

   public final class SerialPort extends IODevice {
       public volatile int status;
       public volatile int data;
   }

Writing data to the serial port is as simple as:

   serial.data = 'x';