Wind River to Head Embedded Eclipse Efforts

Fresh off the introduction of five development partners handling key projects, the Eclipse Foundation this week will add a sixth to spearhead embedded systems efforts.

Wind River Systems Inc. will join Eclipse as a Strategic Developer, according to sources familiar with the plans. The announcement, to be made at the Embedded Systems Conference here this week, will detail the Alameda, Calif., companys plans to help make compiled language tool kits easier to create. Wind River officials declined to comment on the news.

Sources said Wind River will be working alongside Ottawa-based QNX Software Systems Ltd., which oversees the Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) project to deliver a C and C++ IDE (integrated development environment).

Mike Milinkovich, executive director at Eclipse, said at the EclipseCon conference here last week that the organization is moving to add more extensive support for a number of languages, although the Eclipse platform is often seen as primarily Java-focused.

"For general Java, we think Eclipse does a good job, but we have an interest in C and C++. And dynamic language support is sketchy right now [in Eclipse]," said Ed Warnicke, technology lead for a project to adopt Eclipse for the C and C++ embedded space at Cisco Systems Inc., in San Jose, Calif.

Jeff Norris, a computer scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., said: "We use Java extensively for our program. We want to use Eclipse as the center point of multiple development efforts, but a problem comes when we try to integrate C and C++ into that."

Meanwhile, at EclipseCon, the organization showed how Eclipse has quickly emerged into a platform for growth. The Eclipse Foundation announced new strategic members to head or contribute to key efforts around Web tools, testing and performance, data tools, modeling, and systems management.

Click here to find out why some developers at the EclipseCon conference gave Microsoft a "C" for its appearance there.

Milinkovich also said Eclipse will be taking steps to do more in various vertical markets. The first will be health care. Eclipse is working with the Object Management Group to define some standards in the health care industry.

"We work with OMG a lot," Milinkovich said. "Health care is one example, where they have an area where theyre trying to get some new emerging standards out, and they are looking to us as a place to provide a good implementation to help accelerate the adoption of the standard."

Milinkovich listed other efforts including three technology incubator projects: the ERCP (Embedded Rich Client Platform), the ECF (Eclipse Communications Framework) and the ETF (Eclipse Trust Framework).

"ERCP is really interesting because its extending our RCP [Rich Client Platform] model into a whole new platform area of embedded devices," Milinkovich said.

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