Real-time Innovations (RTI) has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider. RTI will deliver its ScopeTools for embedded development as plug-ins for Eclipse, and will support the tools on Eclipse-based IDEs from MontaVista and Wind River.

RTI has not stated whether it will support its tools as plugins for Eclipse-based embedded development IDEs from TimeSys, LynuxWorks, Sysgo, QNX, and others.

RTI and MontaVista announced in late March that RTI would offer its StethoScope, ProfileScope, and MemScope tools as plug-ins for MontaVista's Eclipse based DevRocket IDE. The same day, Linux newcomer but longtime RTI partner Wind River announced that ScopeTools would be the “first significant tools” to be integrated with Wind River's Eclipse-based Workbench, expected to ship in June.

Eclipse

Eclipse is a platform for cross-vendor tools integration, that recently celebrated its second birthday by reorganizing from an industry consortium to an non-profit foundation. Tools that are built for the Eclipse architecture can readily plug into Eclipse-based IDEs on Windows, Linux, or Solaris development hosts.

Wind River announced its Eclipse Foundation membership in December, 2003. MontaVista has served on the Eclipse board since June of 2002.

RTI's ScopeTools

RTI says its ScopeTools provide sophisticated performance analysis and debugging capabilities for complex embedded applications. ScopeTools comprise:

• StethoScope — a real-time data monitor
• ProfileScope — a dynamic profiler
• MemScope — a real-time memory analyzer
• TraceScope — an execution-flow tracer
• CoverageScope — a code coverage analyzer

The tools allow developers to monitor an embedded system while it is running. RTI says developers can use the tools to eliminate memory leaks and make a system reliable, understand where the processor spends time, graphically visualize variables in real-time to locate glitches, see call parameters, return values, and call stacks of any function to find race conditions, and provide details of code coverage to find untested code.

The original RTI ScopeTool, StethoScope, has shipped with Wind River's products since 1992. RTI first offered StethoScope for Linux in January of 2001.

Quotes and analyst reactions

According to RTI, the growing popularity of Linux for embedded applications provides a standard set of target platforms around which RTI can focus its tools development efforts. For developers this will mean a wider choice of tools and a better integrated, more productive work experience, the company says.

“Developer productivity takes a great leap forward with Eclipse. Now we are better able to automate the workflow with plug-in tools that share data and services at each step in the development process,” said RTI CEO Stan Schneider.

“The Eclipse Foundation continues to gain momentum as leading tool vendor RTI joins the fold and announces major product line support for Wind River and MontaVista,” added Skip McGaughey, Eclipse Foundation spokesperson. “RTI has been delivering quality product solutions for many years and we're delighted these will be available for Eclipse.”

“The lack of quality software development tools for embedded developers using the Linux operating system has often been cited as an issue,” commented Stephen Balacco, embedded software analyst, VDC. “By integrating RTI ScopeTools with their Linux product lines, MontaVista and Wind River are providing their customers the professional quality tools they need to optimize system and application performance and reliability.”

 
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