MontaVista will in August begin selling inexpensive subsets of its Linux toolsets aimed at the application developers within embedded Linux development teams. The “Application Development Kits” (ADKs) will comprise an Eclipse based IDE along with the needed libraries and headers to build applications that run on systems running MontaVista Linux.

According to MontaVista, dedicated application developers are increasingly common in embedded development. The ADKs will enable companies to provide development seats for application programmers at considerably less cost than providing full MontaVista platform development seats, the company says.

Another touted advantage of the ADKs is their cross-platform nature. In addition to the standard MontaVista cross-architecture tools, the ADK supports x86, enabling developers to build and test applications on standard PC hardware, and then later rebuild them “with little or no extra work,” according to MontaVista, for traditional embedded architectures when the target hardware becomes available.

The ADKs will support Linux, Windows, and Solaris host environments, and will be sold individually for the broad range of embedded architectures supported by MontaVista Linux. They will include MontaVista's Eclipse-based DevRocket graphical IDE (integrated development environment), along with kernel headers, application headers, and software libraries.

ADKs will include a subset of Platform Tools components
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“Embedded devices today are miniature computers, and the opportunity to differentiate is very high. As a result, embedded teams are including more and more application developers,” said Product Marketing Manager Jacob Lehrbaum.

MontaVista plans to release ADKs for MontaVista Professional 3.1 in August, and for Carrier Grade Edition and Consumer Electronics Edition in the second half of 2004.

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