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Eclipse.org introduces more open source tools

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(03/31/03, 10:30:21 PM EDT)

Raleigh, N.C. -- Momentum toward an open source web oriented integrateddevelopment environment for all connected devices and systems continues tobuild as members of the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project team today released for distribution its' CDT Version 1.0, a major step forward in the creation of an integrated, open cross-platform IDE for C/C++ development.

In a related development, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has transferred AspectJ, a nascent Java language extension and its Aspect Oriented Software Development toolkit to the Eclipse.org open source community . It is designed to to deal with problems that occur in large software systems by separating out and centralizing software for crosscutting issues.

"The CDT project is driving the creation of best-of-breed, commercial-quality tools for the Eclipse Platform," said Sebastien Marineau, senior software architect at QNX Software Systems and project leader for the CDT. "With the release of the CDT, it's clear that support for C/C++ in Eclipse is just as strong as for Java, which is critical for Eclipse adoption into C and C++ dominated development projects such as embedded applications."

Originally an Integrated Development Environment started by IBM Corp. to provide a common environment across all product and technology efforts within the far-flung hardware and software company, the Eclipse IDE was turned into an open source effort a year ago. It is now managed by a consortium of companies such as QNX, Rational, MontaVista, Timesys, Macraigor, SAS, Programming Research and Wasabi who all, in addition to IBM, all contribute development resources.

Written in Java so that it can run on any hardware platform, the Eclipse Platform itself is hardware, OS and language agnostic and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples.

Making C/C++ Platform Independent

According Marc Erickson, Eclipse projects director, the CDT project was launched in the middle of last year in an effort to make C and C++ as platform independent as possible to make them useful in a variety of embedded designs where Java is not suitable.

"The CDT project is an important initiative that will help establish Eclipse as a multi-language IDE for the development of technical and embedded applications, as well as enterprise/IT applications," said Sky Matthews, director of product management, Rational Software, now a part of the IBM Software Group, which contributed its parsing technology to the C/C++ project.

CDT 1.0 is compatible with the latest release of Eclipse, and includes two key components: a full featured C/C++ development environment at the core and a CDT debugger.

The core includes a project builder that integrates with the widely available open source GNU tools and compilers; a code editor that offers features such as syntax highlighting, code templates and context-sensitive help; and wizards that help automate mundane programming tasks. The CDT components are plug-in extensions, fully integrated into the Eclipse Platform.

The CDT C/C++ debugger integrates with the popular open source GNU gdb debugger. In addition to standard features such as run control, thread support, breakpoints, watchpoints and disassembly mode, the CDT debugger also supports multiple concurrent debug sessions, even on heterogenous processors. By integrating with gdb, said Matthews, the CDT debugger can support a wide range of target environments including Linux, QNX Neutrino, Windows and Cygwin.

One Step Closer

With this milestone, the development community is one step closer to having a fully functional open cross-platform C/C++ development environment, one that is competitive in terms of breadth and sophistication of tools with proprietary environments such as Wind River's Tornado, Microsoft's .NET framework, Sun's similarly open sourced NetBeans and Green Hill's Multi.

According to Skip McGaughey, chairperson of the Eclipse Board of Stewards, this new addition to the open source IDE framework will help fulfill one of the ultimate goals of the broader Eclipse Tools project - to encourage the development of interoperable tools from many different vendors.

Illustrative of this movement toward an interoperable programming environment that is Web-wide, Erickson said, is the donation of AspectJ to the open source community, where it will be useful in aiding developers using the Eclipse IDE in applications which may involve the cooperation of a number of separate nodes where issues such as error handling, standards enforcement and feature variations, are very difficult to implement in a modular way.

More broadly, the language provides more ammunition for IBM -- which spearheads Eclipse and supports a range of open source efforts, including Linux -- partners, against Microsoft and other providers of proprietary web services frameworks and IDEs in the race to arm themselves in the emerging battle amongst development frameworks for programmers' hearts and minds.

Eclipse CDT 1.0 can be immediately downloaded at http://www.eclipse.org/tools/downloads.html.

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