"The Eclipse Board's decision to approve the Device Software Development Platform project is great news for the Eclipse community," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, as Wind River Systems and the Foundation today announced that the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) project, the top-level Eclipse project proposed by Wind River in March of this year, has been approved by the Eclipse Board of Directors.

The DSDP is the first project within Eclipse specifically created to address device software development and is designed to drive a common development platform and value into the DSO developer community.

 "The device realm is teeming with software-driven innovation, and we are looking forward to watching this project develop, mature and create even more opportunities for standardization and innovation across the device landscape," Milinkovich added.

The goal of the DSDP project is to extend the Eclipse platform in order to establish a common framework for integration of the complete set of capabilities required by device software developers and a common set of base functionality that can be enhanced and extended by the Eclipse community. A common platform makes plug-in development more efficient and allows developers to target a greater number of operating systems and devices. As project leader, Wind River is leading a growing community of vendors that collaborate on the definition and implementation of this project, including two sub-projects. As the DSDP project matures, other vendors are encouraged to propose additional sub-projects to further increase the value proposition of Eclipse for device software developers.

The first two DSDP sub-projects are:

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

"Wind River is committed to driving standards for this industry and creating solutions for device software optimization that add value to the development process across the development lifecycle and regardless of which operating system the developer chooses," said Tomas Evensen, chief technology officer, Wind River. "By leading and driving this effort, Wind River is helping to form and shape the outcome of the DSDP project, and in turn, the future of our industry."

Stan Schneider, chief executive officer of Real-Time Innovations commented, "Wind River's leadership role in creating the DSDP project will help bring participants and supporters with unique and valuable contributions to the project, the benefits of using tools based on DSDP will be significant."

"Accelerated Technology has been a leader in embedded software tools under Eclipse with our Nucleus EDGE product," said Robert Day, director of marketing, Accelerated Technology Division, Mentor Graphics. "We are looking forward to contributing to the DSDP project to help bring more device software support into the Eclipse environment."

For more information on the DSDP project: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-dsdp/index.html.

• Exclusive Q & A with Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation