Standardizing on a common embedded Eclipse IDE

Major embedded systems tools providers are now supporting the Eclipse IDE as a development environment. With so many commercial rivals involved it is not surprising that there are disagreements over the approach.

Wind River seems to favour an enhanced version, tailored to the task of embedded code development and debug, while others are happy to leave Eclipse to the supporting committees and keep to a single freely available version.

If multiple versions appear, it starts to detract from the original concept of a single open source product enhanced by commercial and free plug-ins. On the other hand there are different ports of Linux around, all based on the open-source code.

• Target Management: The goal of this project is to develop a common framework to manage remote systems, their connections and services. It will provide an abstraction layer to launch and control applications on the device without requiring specific knowledge of the underlying architecture and operating system.
• Device Debugging: The goal here is to create a better API to support the debugging of the software running on the target device. The project will extend the Eclipse platform with a debug model, interfaces and views that work with many different debug engines to support conventional DSP and network processors.

Other vendors have been invited to propose additional sub-projects to further enhance Eclipse as a vehicle for device software development tools. A key aspect of the project will be to improve the available support for C and C++. It has been stated that Wind River will be working alongside QNX Software Systems; which overseas the Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) project, to deliver a C and C++ IDE. Currently Eclipse is more suited to Java development than C/C++. Wind River joins QNX, IBM, Intel and Montavista as major Eclipse supporters.

The compilers have been integrated with the new project wizard, to automate the starting of a new project using Eclipse CDT's "managed Make". The GUI has been configured with Green Hills compiler options. Parsing error and warning messages have been set up so that the related source lines are automatically identified.

Any of the MULTI tools can either be launched natively, or from within the Eclipse interface. This includes the MULTI source-level debugger and instruction set simulators. The output from applications can be viewed using the standard Eclipse console.

Developers can select the New Project Wizard to create a project coding framework for C or C++. All process and thread activity on the target application can be monitored using the System Viewer tool. A project can be quickly created from a variety of templates, including POSIX, or an empty project can be created and loaded with existing code.

Luminosity supports LynuxWorks C/C++ projects for users who want to directly edit/manage their makefiles, giving users control over their build options. Here the debuggers are either based on GDB or the LynuxWorks tools TotalView (for debugging LynxOS and LynxOS-178) and Spyker. The GDB tools consist of GDB with its command line interface, TotalDB which opens GDB with a TCL/TK based GUI, or Built-in which opens the GDB session with the Eclipse IDE�½s interface.

• Faster Parsing - The C/C++ parser has improved speed and performance.
• DOM-based Language Backend - The upgrade includes a more powerful language model in the form of a document object model (DOM), making everything from the C/C++ outliner to searching and refactoring more accessible to plug-in developers.
• Indexer Selection - Source indexers are now pluggable components, allowing users to select from indexing, CTags utility-based indexing, and CDT parser-based indexing.
• Enhanced Managed Build System Configuration - CDT 3.0 improves the experience and workflow for developers and integrators. It offers full control over the output artefact and extension, pre- and post-build command execution as well as per-project and configuration environment variable settings.
• Build Environment Control - CDT 3.0 allows developers to fully configure environmental variables when launching external build commands. The settings are configurable through the standard make and managed build C/C++ project properties, or can be set when creating new projects from the new C/C++ project wizard.
• Increased Support for Tool Integrators - The CDT 3.0 managed build system provides better support for those who extend CDT, including ISVs and OEMs.

Developers benefit from a more intuitive GUI that includes tutorials and demos to guide them through the development process. "Cheat sheets" are provided to help users step through new features and plug-ins to the Eclipse framework.

New multithreaded enhancements to Eclipse also allow the Nucleus EDGE user interface to be more responsive, permitting users to interact with the GUI while the Nucleus EDGE software is running a background task. This is particularly useful when debugging large applications with multiple cores, as engineers may need to focus on different parts of the application at the same time.

The Nucleus EDGE software is available for the ARM7, ARM9 and XScale processor cores on Windows. It supports the ARM GNU, RedHat GNU and ARM Realview C and C++ compilers. MinGW, a compiler for Windows, is also provided for use with the host-based debugging feature, giving users basic application prototyping capabilities on Windows.