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AS OF 7/20/2008 5:46PM EST
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Device Development Enhanced for Eclipse
‘Milestone’ DSDP releases target rich client, devices and dev tools
By P. J. Connolly
December 1, 2006 —
Software development for embedded devices took a step forward in mid-November, when the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of three “milestone” releases within the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform, or DSDP. The effort, started by Wind River Systems and adopted by the foundation in June 2005 as a so-called “top-level” project, now constitutes more than 550,000 lines of code maintained by 40 committers from 10 companies.
The aim of DSDP is to build an extensible, open, scalable and standards-based development platform for the device software market, one built on Eclipse. The three releases cover the fundamental areas of client support, device management and developer tools, and are available at www.eclipse.org/dsdp.
Doug Gaff, DSDP project management committee leader and engineering manager at Wind River, stressed that the overall project had broad support and is “living up to the need for diversity” in an Eclipse top-level project; IBM, MontaVista, Motorola, Nokia, PalmSource, Sony Ericsson, Symbian and TradeScape are all actively participating. “We’ve picked the three that are…the furthest along in terms of release-quality development and…community diversity,” Gaff said.
One of the releases, Embedded Rich Client Platform 1.0, is an extension of the Eclipse RCP to embedded devices, allowing developers to mobilize their applications while using the familiar Eclipse paradigms of views and workbenches. This first release, for Windows Mobile 2003/2005 and Nokia Series 80 and S60 devices, accommodates the constraints of handsets and PDAs by reducing the RCP footprint where possible, while enabling application binary compatibility.
Device management for embedded systems is always a complicated matter. The second DSDP release, Target Management 1.0, is designed to create data models and frameworks that are useful, yet open enough to accommodate vendor-specific extensions. Target Management is based on an open-source version of IBM’s Remote System Explorer. This release includes sample implementations for TCP/IP connections, FTP data transfer through the Jakarta Commons Net library, and remote launching of the GNU Project Debugger in the C/C++ Development Tooling environment.
Finally, Mobile Tools for the Java Platform 0.7 offers a deployment framework, a device and emulator framework, and other tools that extend the Eclipse platform. Although mobile Java allows many combinations of configuration and profiling methods, this first release will focus on the combination of the CLDC (Connected, Limited Device Configuration) and MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) JSRs.
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