Stage-/Afstudeeropdracht – Software engineering. Building Native Images

About Thales

In the Netherlands, where more than 2200 employees are based, we are located in four cities: Huizen, Delft, Eindhoven and Hengelo (HQ). Together with an extensive ecosystem of knowledge partners, customers and suppliers, we work on radars for naval vessels, cyber security solutions, transportation systems, communication equipment for land forces, cryogenic cooling solutions and research & development for radar tech (in collaboration with TU Delft).

The department Software Engineering in Hengelo consists of about 400 engineers (software and system), and is responsible for realizing the software of all Naval products developed by Thales Hengelo: Combat Management, Fire Control and Radar Systems. Software is realized in multi-disciplinary teams using Scrum and industry standard tools.

About the assignment

A variety of technologies are used to realize the Naval systems, one of these is Java. Java is a widely used general purpose technology, with an extensive and active ecosystem of technologies (middleware, databases, etc.), which makes it suitable for realizing medium to large backend systems.

GraalVM is an Oracle initiated Java compiler development that adds (among other things) the ability to create a so-called native image from a Java application. This form of ahead of time compilation has a couple of benefits for Java applications, most notably improving startup time.

The goal of the assignment is to investigate the use of GraalVM’s native image building capability within Thales’ software stack:

• what is needed to build native images (tools, environment),
• what is the impact on already used technologies (frameworks),
• demonstrate the native image building capability using a reference application, and
• create a benchmark comparing the original and native image version of the reference application.

Affinity

In order to execute this assignment, we expect you to have experience with:

Additionally, having experience with any of the following is a pre!

• GraalVM
• Performance benchmarking
• OSGi

What’s in it for you

• An interesting internship or graduation assignment within our high-tech, innovative work environment;
• A comfortable, flexible work space in a modern environment;
• An excellent internship allowance;
• Its own student association where you can participate in educational and fun activities.