Eclipse Releases Platforms for Mobiles, Target Management, Java

With the releases, said Doug Gaff, leader of the DSDP Project Management Committee (PMC) from Wind River, the Eclipse DSDP project now has over forty committers from ten companies and contains more than 550,000 lines of code.

Target Management (TM), release version 1.0, will allow developers 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, he said, 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, said Gaff.

The base technology for the TM project is an open-source version of the IBM Remote System Explorer and incorporates features such as Remote System Explorer framework, CDT remote launch capabilities and integrated Jakarta Commons Net library for FTP access. Contributors to the TM release include Wind River (project lead), IBM, MontaVista, PalmSource, Symbian and Tradescape. It currently will run on Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac development platforms.

Also released was the Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), Version 1.0. Gaff said its is designed to extend the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to embedded devices. "eRCP allows the same Eclipse development model used to create applications on desktop machines to also be used on devices," he said.

eRCP includes a subset of RCP components tailored to mobile devices reduced to fit on constrained devices. Also provided, said Gaff, are 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. Contributing to the eRCP are IBM (project lead), Nokia and Motorola. It operates on Windows Mobile 2003/2005, and Nokia Series 80 and S60, devices.

The third Eclipse release is Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ), release version 0.7, which is designed to extend the Eclipse platform to support mobile device Java application development and contains contains several combinations for configuration (CLDC and CDC) and profile (MIDP, Foundation Profile and Personal Profile). Contributing to this project were Nokia (project lead), IBM and SonyEricsson.

Gaff said Wind River plans to adopt the Target Management technology in our next release of Wind River Workbench. IBM, said DSDP Project Management Committee member Mark Rogalski, is using the eRCP project as the base runtime for IBM's Lotus Expeditor Client for Devices. Mika Hoikkala, project lead for Mobile Tools for the Java Platform from Nokia said the frame works from MTJ will provide a foundation for Nokia's Carbide.j commercial mobile development tools.

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

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