Many applications in emerging scenarios, such as autonomous vehicles, intelligent robots, and industrial automation, are safety-critical with strict timing requirements. However, the development of real-time systems is error prone and highly dependent on sophisticated domain expertise, making it a costly process. This article utilises the principles of model-driven engineering (MDE) and proposes two methodologies to automate the development of real-time Java applications. The first one automatically converts standard time-sharing Java applications to real-time Java applications, using a series of transformations. It is in line with the observed industrial trend, such as for the big data technology, of redeveloping existing software without the real-time notion to realise the real-time features. The second one allows users to automatically generate real-time Java application templates with a lightweight modelling language, which can be used to define the real-time properties—essentially a synthesis process. This article opens up a new research direction on development automation of real-time programming languages and inspires many research questions that can be jointly investigated by the embedded systems, programming languages as well as MDE communities.