Software development suite expanded

Wind River Workbench offers capabilities for developers across the entire development process in a single integrated suite.

Wind River Systems has announced Wind River Workbench 2.4, featuring new product additions and upgrades to the company's commercial grade device software development suite.

Wind River Workbench offers capabilities for developers across the entire development process in a single integrated suite.

In addition to updated Eclipse 3.1 technology and hardware support, Wind River Workbench 2.4 development suite unveils new unit testing and diagnostic products.

"As the extended enterprise continues to branch out and diversify, testing, identifying and resolving defects have become more gruelling than ever".

"At the same time, the pressure to deliver new features and stay ahead of the market is stronger than ever", said John Fanelli, Vice President of Product Marketing, Wind River.

"With Wind River Workbench 2.4, we've maintained ease of development via one single integrated suite, while providing access to the latest Eclipse 3.1 technology and reducing time spent on manual processes".

"Wind River's development suite continues to be the only way for device developers to cut inefficiencies effectively throughout the development lifecycle".

Wind River Workbench is a scalable development suite that increases individual productivity, enables collaboration among hardware and software developers within a project team, and meets diverse development needs across an enterprise.

With the release of Wind River Workbench 2.4, the suite introduces two new products.

Workbench Unit Tester comprises integrated tools that allow developers to create and perform unit testing, code integration testing and test coverage analysis in an easy and standardised way.

Wind River Workbench Unit Tester tools increases product quality, reduces time to market and reduces support costs through better, faster and increasingly automated testing during the development lifecycle.

Workbench Diagnostics is billed as the industry's first Eclipse-based diagnostic product incorporating both nonstop dynamic debugging and forensic-style device-level inspection capabilities.

Wind River Workbench Diagnostics tools allow developers to safely and securely apply diagnostics to a live system, which is then enabled to provide a system status report.

Workbench Diagnostics increases developer productivity by compressing debug cycles and eliminating unnecessary instrumentation-compile cycles.

In addition, in the event of a system failure, Wind River Diagnostics enables developers to effectively execute forensic analysis on a core file and intelligently rewind key system attributes step-by-step prior to the failure.

Until today, device software required time-intensive manual testing prior to deployment.

Companies expend significant time and resources in unit testing and integration testing of their device software.

The new Workbench Unit Tester automates this testing process.

After development and testing of each individual unit, device software must then be integrated as a whole, creating additional opportunity for bugs.

Workbench Diagnostics also enables rapid isolation of problems and root cause identification during the integration testing process with dynamic code sensors.

After units are individually tested and integrated, software can then be deployed to the device.

During the post-development stage of the device lifecycle, additional difficulties in diagnosis arise.

As the extended enterprise grows, so does the need for remote device diagnostics.

To ensure that errors can still be identified and resolved, even across a diverse array of configurations, Wind River Workbench Diagnostics resides directly on the device, allowing it to be accessed once it is in the field.

The entire Workbench development suite has been updated to include the latest Eclipse-based technology, including the Eclipse 3.1 software developer kit (SDK).

The Workbench 2.4 development suite is tightly integrated with Wind River's VxWorks 6.2 and Linux platforms, providing a device software optimisation development environment.

Significant investment continues to be made in on-chip debugging support within Workbench.

Workbench OCD Edition is still OS-agnostic with the ability to debug any Linux kernel.

Workbench 2.4 includes wide coverage of architectures and processors on VxWorks-, Linux- and ThreadX-based devices.

Developers benefit from significant breadth of silicon-supported end-to-end coverage of the Wind River platform (operating system and tools) on the market's leading processors.

Organisations can standardise on Workbench in a heterogeneous architecture-based device manufacturer.

Furthermore, Wind River's comprehensive silicon portfolio can be leveraged by developers during the entire lifecycle, from hardware bring-up through OCD tools to application development.

Major hardware-related enhancements will include support for Coldfire architecture, new ARM and MIPS cores and market-leading processors from Freescale, Intel and other semiconductor vendors.

The Wind River Workbench 2.4 suite of products is available today in early access for select customers and will be generally available in late November 2005.

Workbench Unit Tester and Workbench Diagnostics will be generally available for use with VxWorks in late November 2005.

Back to top