Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) Announces Three Milestone Releases

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to the implementation of a universal software development platform, today 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 40 committers from ten companies and contains more than 550,000 lines of code.

“These three releases are important milestones in DSDP’s progress as a top-level Eclipse project”

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 specialized, interoperable solutions so that customers and users of Eclipse-based products can develop device software faster, better and at lower cost.

DSDP Milestone Releases

The three DSDP projects achieving milestone releases include:

    1. Target Management (TM), release version 1.0
        Mission: 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.
        1.0 Features: Remote System Explorer framework, CDT remote
        launch capabilities and integrated Jakarta Commons Net library
        for FTP access.
        Contributors: Wind River (project lead), IBM, MontaVista,
        PalmSource, Symbian and Tradescape.
        Supports: Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac.
    2. Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), release version 1.0
        Mission: The goal of this project 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.
        1.0 Features: Utilizes the familiar Eclipse programming model
        of applications providing Views to a workbench, reduces RCP
        footprint to fit on constrained devices, provides patches to
        core components to enable running those components on JME
        CDC/Foundation Profile mobile devices, and enables application
        binary compatibility across a range of devices with different
        input mechanisms and screen types/sizes.
        Contributors: IBM (project lead), Nokia and Motorola.
        Supports: Windows Mobile 2003/2005, Nokia Series 80 and S60.
    3. Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ), release version 0.7
        Mission: 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.
        0.7 Features: A device and emulator framework, a deployment
        framework, generic build processes for mobile application
        development, mobile device debugging, application creation
        wizards, UI design tools, localization, optimization and
        security.
        Contributors: Nokia (project lead), IBM and SonyEricsson.
        Supports: Windows tools, Mobile deployment (Nokia).

“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.”

Availability

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

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.