While at Purdue, I have worked on the Ovm Java Virtual Machine. Ovm is currently being used by several companies to evaluate Realtime Java, and was recently used in an unmanned aerial vehicle by Boeing. My contributions to Ovm include a bytecode-to-C++ compiler, a conservative garbage collector, and various smaller components.

Publications

• Krzysztof Palacz, Jason Baker, Chapman Flack, Christian Grothoff, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and Jan Vitek. Engineering a Customizable Intermediate Representation. In Science of Computer Programming, 57(3):357-378, July 2005.
• Jeremy Manson, Jason Baker, Antonio Cunie, Suresh Jagannathan, Marek Prochazka, Bin Xin, Jan Vitek. Preemptible Atomic Regions for Real-time Java. In the proceedings of The 26th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, Miami Florida, Dec. 2005.
• Jason Baker, Atonio Cunie, Chapman Flack, Filip Pizlo, Marek Prochazka, Jan Vitek, Austin Armbruster, Edward Pla, and David Holmes. Real-time Java in Avionics Applications. To appear in the proceedings of The 12th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium San Jose, California, Apr. 2006.

• I adapted the JanosVM Java Virtual Machine's profiling mechanism to use the x86 real-time clock interrupt when JanosVM is configured as an operating system kernel.
• I started work on refactoring tools for the Jiazzi component system for Java. Jiazzi allows independently defined components to be statically linked to build complete applications. My refactoring tools replace OO techniques for implementing modularity with Jiazzi's modularity constructs. These tools convert Java packages containing interface declarations to Jiazzi component signatures, create component signatures from packages of code, remove interface inheritance and the casts that coding to interfaces in Java introduce, and eliminate occurrences of the singleton pattern and factory methods.

My Master's thesis involved defining an extension to Java that allows programmers to define their own syntax extensions, implementing this language as a source-to-bytecode compiler, and developing new parsing techniques needed to make it work. Before arriving at a thesis topic, I did some work on memory management for Java and on JVM internals.

Publications

• Jason Baker and Wilson C. Hsieh. Maya: Multiple Dispatch Syntax Extension in Java. In Proceedings of The 2002 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation. Berlin, Germany, Jun. 2002.
• Jason Baker and Wilson C. Hsieh. Runtime Aspect Weaving Through Metaprogramming. In Proceedings of The 1st International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Enschede, The Netherlands, Apr. 2002.
• Alastair Reid, John McCorquodale, Jason Baker, Wilson Hsieh, and Joseph Zachary The Need for Predictable Garbage Collection. In Proceedings of The ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Compiler Support for System Software. Atlanta GA, May 1999.

While at OneNet, I was part of a team that developed a large application in C using Informix, AIX, and a library for writing terminal-based applications called Vermont Views. Because I was one of the first programmers on this project, I was able to play a significant role.

• I wrote a powerful library that used Vermont Views' structural reflection capabilities. Many library functions could be used in form callbacks directly, thus minimizing the amount of code associated with each form.
• I modified Vermont Views' form designer to act as an application-specific code generating wizard. The original form designer generated a declaration for each callback function, and my changes made these declarations useful. Each kind of callback function was generated from a distinct template with sed. These templates captured much of the rote typing that could not be factored into the project's libraries.
• I defined conventions for using shared libraries, and modified the build system to support them.

Awards

• President's Award
• Special Recognition Award