QNX IDE Adds Momentics To Eclipse Momentum

June 3, 2002 --- At ESC in Chicago, Il., this week QNX Software Systems, Inc. (Kanata, Canada) took the wraps off the newest addition to its repetoire of network and telecom optimized operating systems and development tools: the Eclipse-based Momentics Development Suite.

It is the latest in a string of Eclipse based software offerings from tool and OS vendors who have opted to link their fortunes - and their products --- to a Java-based IDE originally developed by IBM. Now an open source offering, it allows any tool to be linked into an open, and free, development framework that compares favorably with most proprietary ones in sophistication and flexibility.

Since the beginning of the year, a growing number of vendors have thrown their support behind the open Eclipse IDE that relieves them of the burden and cost of developing one that matches features available from proprietary IDEs such as Wind River's Tornado.

It is supported by a new open source community named Eclipse.org, the founding members of which include Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, RedHat, SuSE, WebGain and TogetherSoft. It will manage the new platform which is being made available in open source under the Common Public License. These companies together with new members Serena, Sybase and Fujitsu form the Eclipse.org board of directors. Since January, more than 1,200 individual developers from over 150 leading software tool suppliers in 63 countries have already participated in the eclipse.org In addition to QNX, Borland, IBM, Rational and RedHat have announced products based on Eclipse.

The open source platform is built around $40 million worth of internally developed IBM software tools for its Websphere Studio Workbench that the company has placed in the open source community. The platform is an attempt to provide the glue by which developers on almost any product in the increasingly net-centric computing market can move seamlessly within the same tool environment from an embedded or small footprint iappliance computing or control device, to the server which is providing the services it uses as well as to the middleware infrastructure in between.

According to Dan Dodge, president and CTO of QNX, a tool environment using the Eclipse framework can be used to create and manage diverse objects like web site elements, process automation definitions, object models, image files, C++ programs, pervasive enterprise class Java applications and embedded and small footprint iappliance devices. Written in the Java language, it comes with plug-in construction toolkits and examples, including a fully operational Java application development tools package. The platform implements a mechanism that discovers, loads and integrates the plug-ins developers need for manipulating and sharing project resources. Although written in Java, it is language independent.

QNX, in common with a number of RTOS embedded tool vendors, have always operated an a slight disadvantage in the marketplace compared to industry leaders such as Wind River Systems, Inc., because the latter has always been able to pair its operating system with a sophisticated integrated development environment that allowed consistent and rapid design across a wide range of processors supported by its operating system.

Providers of specialized tools targeted at particular steps in the development processor or optimized for particular market segments have usually had to give up some of their independence to gain access to the broad base of engineers by entering into cooperative arrangements that allowed their tools to operate on a number of proprietary IDEs. Competing tool/OS vendors either had the options of developing their own IDEs (Accelerated, Green Hills), continuing to develop sophisticated command line packages or use a third party development tool environment from a company such as Microsoft(Lynuxworks).

Over the past year or so QNX has moved to make its tools and operating systems more attractive to developers, moving beyond its exclusive dependence on the X86 platform with support in its tools and OS for most of the major processor families, including PowerPC, ARM, StrongARM, XScale, and SH-4; and increasing the number of languages it supports (C, C++, Embedded C++, Java).

In the Eclipse-derived Momentics, said Alex Sanders, QNX vice president of marketing, all tools - even third-party tools - share the same user interface. With the emergence of Eclipse, he said, the time and expense to develop an IDE matching the sophistication of, say, Tornado, has been eliminated for QNX.

Taking advantage of the Eclipse platform, QNX's Momentics includes a task-oriented user interface, wizards, shortcuts, a built-in search engine, project management, and integrated versioning. The development suite has been tightly integrated with the company's Neutrino RTOS.

Integrated into the Professional version of the new IDE are GUI-based and Eclipse enabled versions of the company's source debugger, target navigator and information tools, profiler and memory analyzer, and version control too, as well as the company's Photon application builder. Also incorporated into the environment are the industry standard open source GNU tool chain including gcc, gdb, binutils (assembler, linker, etc.), and make. A standard version of Momentics includes all of the same tools, but with the traditional command line interface (CLI). Whereas earlier the tools were sold separately from the board support packages, in the new offering, BSPs for the x86, PowerPC, MIPS, SH-4, XScale, ARM, and StrongARM are integrated with the IDE, including documentation, working source code for start-up components and device drivers, and program binaries for the different targets. Also integrated into the IDE are device driver kits for a wide variety of embedded and small footprint netcentric iappliance devices (audio, input, graphics, network, printer, USB, etc.)

Also integrated with Momentics is an instrumented version of the QNX Neutrino kernel, allowing developers to capture the interactions of all components in the target system, no matter how remote to pinpoint timing conflicts, logic flaws, and hardware faults, and other performance-degrading hotspots.

Available now, the Professional Eclipse-enabled graphical version of Momentics is priced at $8,695 per seat. The Standard CLI version is $4,295 per seat. For more information, go to http://www.qnx.com