Eclipse is an open source community aimed at building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software. While Eclipse is aimed at all types of software, CDT has a strong embedded focus, and DSDP was initiated by Wind River Systems in 2005 to add device support.

The new features in both CDT and DSDP will come with the Eclipse "Europa" release, expected in late June. That release also marks the fifth anniversary of CDT, said Doug Schaefer, senior software developer at QNX Software Systems and CDT project lead.

CDT includes editing, source navigation, build navigation, and debugging. Schaefer said that the upcoming CDT 4.0 is a "huge milestone" for Eclipse. "We've become the industry de-facto standard development environment outside of Windows," he said. "CDT is a mature project and a mature development environment." CDT-based environments are available from such vendors as Wind River, QNX, LynuxWorks, Mentor Graphics, and Telelogic.

The new CDT release is focused on "improving the user experience," Schaefer said. He noted that it includes a simplified project wizard, new source navigation views, and improved performance of index-based features. CDT 4.0 also claims tighter integration with the MinGW Gnu tool chain, making it easier to develop C/C++ applications on Windows, and has added support for GDB-based JTAG debugging.

The DSDP project announced the first commercial availability of several of its components in November 2006. Those included Target Management 1.0, which aims to create data models and frameworks to manage remote devices; the Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP 1.0), which extends the Eclipse RCP to the embedded space; and the Mobile Tools for Java (MTJ 0.7) platform, which supports mobile-device Java development.

In the latest release, a debugger framework from the DSDP Device Debugging (DD) project claims to provide additional performance, functionality and modularity for commercial embedded debuggers built on Eclipse. "We're working on a new debugging framework that's adapted for embedded designers," said Doug Gaff, DSDP manager at Wind River and DSDP project lead. The new debugging framework, he said, includes extensible modules for specific tasks, a "thread-safe" concurrency mechanism, and a "view model" for populating debugger views in Eclipse.

The DD project is also working with the Spirit Consortium on system-on-chip debugging technology, and Spirit has contributed an editor and sample debugger for its IP-XACT XML "metadata" format, Gaff said. Several different organizations are working on debug standards, Gaff noted, and he said the Spirit collaboration might help "collapse some of these standards and build pragmatic solutions."

The Eclipse Europa release also adds expanded mobile platform support for Windows CE 5.0 and Nokia S60 in the DSDP eRCP project. Enhancements to the MTJ project include a visual flow editor, LCDUI designer, and support for external obfuscators, localizers, profiles and configurations.

Target Management 2.0 is a goal for Europa. It's expected to support user-defined actions on remote systems, full Eclipse file system support on all connections, integrated terminal emulation, and improved flexibility, APIs and platform integration. Companies leveraging DSDP include Wind River, MontaVista, Atmel, IBM, Motorola, and QNX.