April 7, 2006; 05:15 AM
The Eclipse
Foundation announced new project initiatives and releases for the Device Software Development Platform
(DSDP) and C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) Projects, both increasingly popular with original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs) and vendors of real-time operating systems (RTOSs), software development tools, and
electronic design automation (EDA) tools. These new initiatives further extend the Eclipse ecosystem into
the embedded and device software markets.
“Eclipse is quickly becoming the universal platform for tools integration with OEMs and tools vendors,”
said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The CDT and DSDP projects are
extending the platform and provide the frameworks specific for embedded and device developers. In the
last year we have seen tremendous success with vendors and users adopting these projects as their tools
solution.”
These project initiatives include:
CDT Project – The next release of the CDT Project will focus on supporting large C/C++ projects as
well as integrations with a more diverse collection of build and debug tools. It will feature a new indexer
architecture that makes it easier to search and cross-reference C/C++ code and new expanded debugger support
to handle different variants of gdb/MI protocols often found in large scale C/C++ development organizations.
The managed build system will also be updated to support a larger diversity of tool chains, offer greater
flexibility of build options and improve CDT's knowledge of the build process, which will eliminate the need
for an external build tool like "make." CDT 3.1 will be released as part of the June Callisto release train. .
Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ) Project – This new DSDP project, proposed and led by Nokia,
will provide frameworks for runtime management of devices and emulators, build management and
deployment of J2ME applications, mobile device debugging, application creation wizards, UI design
tools, localization, and mobile security extensions. The initial release is scheduled for June and
will focus on runtime management, build and deployment of J2ME applications.
Native
Application Builder (NAB) Project – Another DSDP project, proposed and
led by Fujitsu, NAB provides a visual GUI builder and graphics runtime
libraries for device applications running on Linux, Windows CE, ITRON
and other device operating systems. The visual GUI builder generates
C++ source code and uses CDT for the edit-compile-debug cycle where
applicable for the device operating system. It brings to Eclipse,
technology originally developed in the WideStudio project, a very
popular open source project in the Japanese market. NAB will release in
June.
The Device Debugging (DD) Project – The project
focuses on building enhanced debug models, APIs and views to provide
greater visibility into and control over device software targets. The
DD project is working to improve the flexibility and customization of
the Eclipse Debug Model Interfaces, and new versions of these
Interfaces, as well as debugger view enhancements, which will be
released in June as part of the Callisto release. These Interfaces can
be used on top of the Eclipse Platform or inside CDT to build custom
debugger implementations for multi-core development and on-chip
debugging support.
The Target Management (TM) Project – TM is
creating data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote
systems, their connections and their services. The Target Management
architecture will be based on a software contribution from IBM called
Remote Systems Explorer. The initial release of Target Manager will
occur in September and will include remote target launch capabilities
compatible with CDT.
“We’ve demonstrated significant
progress since DSDP was established as a top-level Eclipse project last
year,” said Doug Gaff, leader of the DSDP Project Management Council
(PMC) from Wind River. “Community participation and our vision for a
common, open standards based device software development platform are
taking shape more quickly than expected. The first projects will
release this June and commercial products are expected to ship shortly
after.”
“CDT is quickly becoming the industry standard for C and
C ++ development in the embedded world,” said Doug Schaefer, project
leader for the CDT and senior software developer at QNX Software
Systems. “The fact that the CDT is being used by commercial vendors for
applications from tiny embedded microcontrollers to large multi-core
targets validates the functionality of the CDT feature set for embedded
environments.”
The CDT project forms the basis of at least 17
commercially available development tools including those from QNX
Software Systems, Intel, Nokia, Texas Instruments and Siemens.
Currently, more than 25 companies contribute to the CDT project. Since
the creation of the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) as a
top-level Eclipse project in June 2005, representatives from more than
20 companies have joined the project and actively contribute source
code. Both projects are actively recruiting new users and contributors
to their technology.
Demos of CDT and DSDP projects can be seen in action this
week at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Calif.
Eclipse-focused sessions include “The Eclipse Device Software Platform
Project” (April 6, 2006, 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PT) and “Eclipse: Under
the Hood” (April 6, 2006, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT).
About the Eclipse Foundation
Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on
providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks
for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks
that span the software development lifecycle, including support for
modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others,
testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client
applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of
major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and
research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support
the Eclipse Platform.
The
Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation
that hosts the Eclipse projects. Full details of Eclipse and the
Eclipse Foundation are available at www.eclipse.org.