14 November 2006

Eclipse DSDP Announces Three Milestone Releases

The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal software development platform, has announced three milestone releases within the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP).

Founded in 2005 as a top-level Eclipse project, the mission of DSDP is to create an open, extensible, scalable and standards-based development platform to address the needs of the device software market. This series of releases demonstrates the growing momentum and diversity of projects in DSDP. Created by Wind River, the DSDP project now has over forty committers from ten companies and contains more than 550,000 lines of code.

As they move forward, the DSDP projects are aiming to help developers and vendors create specialised, interoperable solutions so that customers and users of Eclipse-based products can develop device software faster, better and at lower cost.

The three DSDP projects achieving milestone releases include:  Target Management release version 1.0, Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), release version 1.0 and Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ), release version 0.7.

"The DSDP project is crucial to fulfilling Eclipse’s goal of creating a universal development platform for increasingly complex software," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "DSDP has gained rapid momentum, and with these three major releases, the project now provides a broad foundation for commercial device software."

"These three releases are important milestones in DSDP’s progress as a top-level Eclipse project," added Doug Gaff, leader of the DSDP Project Management Committee (PMC) from Wind River. "Wind River is particularly pleased that because of Target Management’s successful release, device software developers now have an open source framework and a set of views for managing remote embedded systems from Eclipse. Wind River plans to adopt the Target Management technology in our next release of Wind River Workbench."

The goal of Target Management is to create data models and frameworks to configure and manage embedded systems, their connections and services. Since there are many different vendors and solutions in the device software space, the main charter of target management is to provide data models and frameworks that are flexible and open enough for vendor-specific extensions. For the 1.0 release, sample implementations will be provided for TCP/IP connections, FTP data transfer and GDB remote launching in the CDT environment. The base technology for the TM project is an open-source version of the IBM Remote System Explorer. The project has been lead by Wind River with IBM, MontaVista, PalmSource, Symbian and Tradescape contributing.

The goal of Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) release version 1.0 is to extend the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to embedded devices. eRCP enables the same Eclipse development model used to create applications on desktop machines to also be used on devices. The project includes a subset of RCP components tailored to mobile devices. The project is being lead by IBM with contributions from Nokia and Motorola.

Finally the goal of MTJ is to extend the Eclipse platform to support mobile device Java application development. The purpose is to develop both frameworks that can be extended by tool vendors and tools that can be used by third party mobile java application developers. Mobile Java domain contains several combinations for configuration (CLDC and CDC) and profile (MIDP, Foundation Profile and Personal Profile). Currently the most common combination is CLDC+MIDP. Contributors are headed up by Nokia and include IBM and Sony Ericsson.

"With the eRCP and MTJ project releases, mobile Java developers have two new open source projects to facilitate the development and execution of Java ME applications," said DSDP Project Management Committee member Mark Rogalski. "IBM is using the eRCP project as the base runtime for IBM's Lotus Expeditor Client for Devices. Lotus Expeditor provides a programming model that delivers a universal client experience across the Lotus client portfolio, including Websphere Portal, Lotus Sametime and the new version of Lotus Notes code-named Hannover. The Lotus Expeditor Toolkit plugs directly into Eclipse or Rational Application Developer."

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. A large and vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities, research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse platform. ARM joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider in September of this year.

ARM currently offers Eclipse IDE support as an option in the RealView Development Suite 3.0 solution, enabling developers to use Eclipse as a project manager to create, build, debug and manage C and C++ projects for ARM targets.

Device Software Development Platform releases are available for download at: www.eclipse.org/dsdp.