What a difference a decade makes. In 1999, every embedded systems
tool provider who had an RTOS and a set of tools supported them with a
proprietary integrated development environment (IDE), tying everything
into a neat tightly connected tool chain.
Now, one of the last holdouts - Texas Instruments - has
abandoned its
proprietary IDE in favor of one based on open source
Eclipse.
The transition is complete, with virtually every major embedded
software vendor to varying degrees supporting their own implementation of Eclipse or providing links to it from their own proprietary IDEs,
including Express Logic, Wind River, Green Hills, QNX, Lynux Works, and Mentor Graphics, among others.
But it was not always that way. In 1999, in addition to the variety
of IDEs jerry-rigged out of a combination of command line interfaces
and various Microsoft and Unix windowing kludges, three offered the
potential of becoming the defacto industry IDE: Integrated System's
Prisim+, Wind River's Tornado and IBM's VisualAge Micro Edition.
What all three had in common was an easy to use
"software backplane" into which developers with a minimum of
programming effort could plug the various tools needed to do code
development quickly and efficiently on each vendor's RTOS.
ISI used the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA) as its common API. Wind
River used an object module format built around the very C-like Tool Command Language (TCL).
Somewhere in the middle in terms of complexity and ease of use was IBM's VisualAge which used a
Java-based object-oriented software backplane.
All three also
allowed third party vendors and even customers and users of the various
IDEs to add in their own tools with varying degrees of coupling.
By 2004, everything had changed. IBM open-sourced Visual Age Micro
Edition as Eclipse,
Wind River acquired ISI and abandoned further development its TCL
backplane in favor of Eclipse.
On Embedded.com we have tracked the
Eclipse's evolution closely with articles on such topics as Eclipse under the hood, using Eclipse for C/C++
development, extending the Eclipse CDT managed build
system, Target Management,
Device Debug, Mobile Java,
multicore software
development and using an Eclipse-based IDE.
What is next for Eclipse? Recently, Eclipse was used to integrate model-centric
systems development with the traditional code-centric approach,
allowing developers to move code back and forth between the two
environments. What are some of the other things we can look forward to?
What are the drawbacks to Eclipse? To complicated? Too open? Not
open enough? What areas of improvement would you like to see? New
plug-ins?
Are, as Mike McCullough suggests in "Closed
for business: how open is Eclipse open source?" many
implementations of Eclipse offered by software vendors "open" in name
only? (Embedded.com Editor
Bernard Cole, bccole@acm.org)
