Wind River Focuses on Open Source

Wind River—the largest vendor of software platforms and tools in the embedded market—has focused its message for the 2005 Embedded Systems Conference on open source, open standards and open technologies, announcing an expanded role in the Eclipse Foundation, proposing device-oriented extensions to the Eclipse software development platform, and unveiling a significant contribution to an open-source project for interprocess/interprocessor communications.

Additionally, the company says it has increased its investment in organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation, OSDL and CELF.

Eclipse role and project

Wind River first adopted Eclipse technology in December of 2003, and the company has marketed the Eclipse-based Workbench IDE (integrated development kit) since February, 2004.

Now, Wind River has joined the very largest Eclipse supporters—including IBM, Intel, MontaVista, and QNX—becoming a “strategic developer” rather than merely an add-in provider.

As part of its increased stature within the Eclipse Foundation, Wind River has proposed a new top-level project that, if approved, would become one of seven such projects.

The Device Software Development Platform project would focus on improving the Eclipse framework for use in developing device software, for example ensuring support for the broad diversity of microprocessors typically found in the embedded market, a Wind River spokesperson said.

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Device Software Development Platform

Wind River issued the following “Project Declaration,” which defines its vision for the proposed Device Software Development Platform extensions to the Eclipse framework:

The goal of the Device Software Development Platform is to provide an open-source framework and exemplary tools to support the creation of embedded applications.

Users of the Device Software Development Platform will find it easier to create plug-ins that work across a wide range of Eclipse based development environments, operating systems, connection mechanisms and target architectures. Projects will initially focus on target management to enable developers to deploy, debug and analyze applications on a device as well as the configuration of operating system and middleware components.

We will work closely with CDT [the C/C++ Development Tools project] and other Eclipse Projects to improve the overall platform by adding capabilities needed for embedded development, such as asynchronous debugger interfaces and scalable parsing technology, in a consistent and meaningful way.

We look forward to input and discussion from the Eclipse community.

“By bringing the Device Software Development Project to the market, Wind River will help change the way device software development is done,” said Wind River chief marketing officer, John Bruggeman.

“Manufacturers will now be able to standardize on choice—using a widely accepted, fully integrated development platform that supports all Eclipse technologies and is backed by an unprecedented ecosystem of industry-leading companies.”

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