EclipseSource:
At last week’s Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Wind River Systems
reported progress of the DSDP’s newest subprojects—Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ)
and Native Application Builder (NAB). Both were approved in January and are on
track for June release, according to Steve Heintz, head of product management,
developer technologies and tools at Wind River.
Spawned by Nokia, MTJ will extend Eclipse to better facilitate debugging of
mobile devices running Java with extensible frameworks initially focused on a
CLDC + MIDP configuration.
Of interest starts here =>
Perhaps the more ambitious project, the goal of NAB is to create a device
runtime so that C++ GUIs can be reused on multiple devices with no changes to
source code. “This is similar to SWT in Java,” explained Doug Gaff, manager of
engineering for the DSDP project. “Write once and run on any device.”
At the core of the technology is the Multiplatform Widget Toolkit, a GUI library
built specifically for each device. “MWT is the runtime,” said Gaff. For app
design, Eclipse presents a form layout environment similar to Visual Basic that
autogenerates target code. “You can prototype apps on Win or Linux and then
deploy them to the device,” he said. The Eclipse version of the tool, originally
developed under the WideStudio open-source project, is now in beta.
Heintz said that much of the DSDP’s efforts involve projects in the Eclipse
platform itself. “We’ve been focusing on influencing other groups. You’ll see
some of our influence on the upcoming 3.2 release of the main platform,” which
is scheduled for June.
For instance, Gaff said the DSDP’s Device Debugging subproject has brought about
“radical changes…like an entirely new debugging model with asynchronous access.”
The asynchronous API, as explained on the Eclipse Web site, “enables
interactions with debuggers connected with a remote process and allows for
cancellation of a request made against a target.”