Eclipse open-source programming toolkit

-- Control Engineering, 4/18/2007

San Jose, CA—At the Embedded Systems Conference held in San Jose, CA, Aonix, a provider of solutions for safety- and mission-critical applications, announced that it is leading a new Eclipse-based initiative to create an Ada Development Toolkit (ADT) project and will collaborate with the Eclipse Foundation toward that end. The initiative effectively opens the company’s Eclipse plug-in technology to the open-source community. The company has proposed to the Eclipse Foundation that its AonixADT technology be used in the ADT project as the core baseline technology. Opening AonixADT to the user community through an authorized Eclipse project will provide the Ada community free access to the open and extensible solution.

Ada is a structured, statically typed imperative computer programming language. According to “Ada (programming language),” a Wikipedia article on the subject, the language has one of the best type-safety systems available in a statically typed programming language. Ada was originally targeted at embedded and real-time systems. Notable features include strong typing, modularity mechanisms (packages), run-time checking, parallel processing (tasks), exception handling, and generics.

Aonix says AonixADT can be used with a large set of existing plug-ins for third-party tools, including support for source-code configuration management. The company was an early participant in the Eclipse open-tools movement, and has provided Ada Development Toolkit plug-ins for Aonix and GNAT compilers since 2004.

By standardizing on a single IDE, companies that adopt Eclipse may eliminate the efforts traditionally required to learn and maintain multiple development environments. Within Eclipse, companies can combine in-house development tools with best-of-breed commercial products. This integration streamlines interactions within the development environment, simplifying the work process used by each developer daily, saving significant time and reducing overall development costs.

“We’re very pleased with the offer from Aonix to lead an ADT Project initiative,” said Doug Schaefer, QNX Software Systems, Eclipse CDT Project Lead. “Adding Ada to the Eclipse list of supported languages is further evidence of its broad acceptance as the best possible cross-language, cross-industry development IDE.”

—Edited by C.G. Masi, senior editor
Control Engineering Daily News Desk