Wind River on Dec. 15 will ship a new version of its Eclipse-based development toolsuite that will, for the first time, be available as a set of plugins, greatly increasing deployment flexibility. Workbench 2.6 also features new test and analysis tools, a sophisticated patch manager for Linux, and online documentation.

Steven Heintz, director of product management, says Workbench's availability as plugins shows that Wind River is “starting to show what we're investing in,” with regard to leadership and large contributions to the Device Software Development Project, a top-level Eclipse initiative that two weeks ago achieved its first stable releases.

Heintz explains, “In the past, there were a couple of areas where Eclipse was not at the level of maturity needed for commercial development, particularly around multicore capabilities in the editor, such as code navigation and symbol navigation in CDT. And, while Eclipse was mature for Java development, it did not offer views of registers on the different embedded processors, and other things needed by device developers.”

As a result, embedded tools vendors used Eclipse code merely as a “headstart” in developing their own heavily re-written IDEs (integrated development environments), rather than as the open source framework for cross-vendor tools plugins that it is intended to be. Now, recent enhancements such as target management change all that, according to Heintz. He said, “We now believe the Eclipse base is mature enough to offer our product as a set of plugins compatible with Eclipse-based IDEs from IBM, MontaVista, or other companies in the device software space.”

Heintz adds, “We're not intending to be in the IDE business. We don't believe we can optimize the 'compile edit debug' phase much further. Where we can make a difference is helping developers visually construct applications, perform analysis at the OS level and above, and patch running systems deployed in the field.”

About 100 Wind River developers work on Eclipse and its Workbench tools, according to Heintz.

Workbench 2.6 — a “common cockpit” for device developers

Wind River says its move to an all-plugin architecture will enable developers to integrate its software design, analysis, and test tools with existing development projects or workflows, even preserving existing configurations in some cases.

However, the switch also will likely mean adopting Wind River's embedded distributions. The company's tool and Platform products are licensed as a unit, for one thing, and the software products contain hooks aimed at enabling the tools to provide “increased insight” during development, debugging, and especially testing and validation, according to Wind River.

Heintz explains, “[Our Platforms] have the instrumentation and tooling built in that allows these tools to work.”

Still, if a company is willing to switch out its Linux kernel and filesystem for Wind River's, the migration should be smoothed by Workbench's ability to run as a plugin alongside CDT (C/C++ development tool) in a single Eclipse shell. Most other embedded Linux tools vendors rely on the CDT editor.

Wind River describes additional new features and capabilities in Workbench 2.6 as follows:

• Java Development Toolkit (JDT) is now included, and multi-language development is supported, letting users “debug Java calls into C or C++,” within the same environment
• Upgrade to version 3.2.1 of the Eclipse framework, said to offer greater stability and improved memory usage compared with the 3.1 release on which Workbench 2.4 was based
• New Linux plugins and plugin capabilities

  • Linux Patch Manager (Screenshot) offers a visual tool for importing and managing kernel patches
  • The popular ScopeTools dynamic visual analysis tools gain support for uClibc, a small-footprint version of the GNU C library
  • Support for QEMU, an open source target emulator supporting 386, X86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and Sparc. Using QEMU is more accurate than cross-development, and can be easier and less expensive than using actual target hardware, Wind River says

Workbench 2.6 also adds several new plugins for VxWorks, Wind River's proprietary RTOS (real-time operating system), including on-chip debugging for the minimal kernel layer (MLK), better performance of VxWorks project images, and a better kernel object viewer.

New online resources

Along with Workbench 2.6, Wind River has launched an online help and documentation resource featuring extensive video content, as well as Workbench user forums. Content hosted at the Wind River Development Center can be accessed via normal entry to the website, or invoked directly through contextual help links within Workbench. This feature is especially useful in assisting developers with infrequently performed tasks, such as code analysis and testing, Heinz notes.

Availability

The upgraded Wind River Workbench 2.6 toolset will be available Dec. 15. A variety of subscription-based licensing options will be offered, with pricing starting at about $1,000 per seat for the “Application Developer” version without kernel analysis/debugging tools, according to Heinz.

Another embedded OS and tools company, MontaVista, also recently announced plans to move its Eclipse-based tools to an all-plugin architecture, launching an open beta expected to lead to a release by mid-2007. Both companies cite similar reasons for “going plugin.”

 
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