Milestones in open device software development

The Eclipse Foundation has announced three milestone releases within the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP).

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.

Beyond highlighting momentum within DSDP, these milestone releases demonstrate an increasing significance of Eclipse to the device software market overall.

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 are: Target Management (TM), 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 goal of Target Management is to create data models and frameworks to configure and manage embedded systems, their connections and services.

As 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 goal of the Embedded Rich Client Platform 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 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.

"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", said 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".

"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".

"Nokia sees the first GA releases of these projects as major progress in combining the power of open source development and commercial products for development in the device market", said Mika Hoikkala, Project Lead for Mobile Tools for the Java Platform from Nokia.

"Though developed in our open source Eclipse project group, the frameworks from MTJ will provide a foundation for Nokia's Carbide.j commercial mobile development tools".

Device Software Development Platform releases are available for download from the Eclipse Foundation website.

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