Книга: Embedded Linux development using Eclipse

Foreword: A Brave New World of Embedded Software Development

Foreword: A Brave New World of Embedded Software Development

The world of embedded computing has always struggled to offer its developers a consistent user interface. In the early days of 8-bit processors, the tools required to program them were very specific to the processor architecture, and developers used incircuit emulators to debug their machine-code based applications. Then, as high level languages emerged, a consistency and portability of embedded code emerged. Sadly, the user interface to use and debug these high level applications was typically proprietary to the tools vendor providing them. The open-source community provided good compiler tools such as GNU GCC, but the debug interface for GNU GDB was basic, and had no concept of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The closest any embedded vendors got to a consistent user interface was to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio extendibility to produce an embedded IDE, which was both beholden to Microsoft and only available on a Windows platform.

Fast forward to around 2003, and some embedded vendors (typically providing embedded Linux or similar OS solutions) decided to investigate using an open-source framework called Eclipse. This framework was not designed to be an embedded IDE, but was open and extendible enough that it could be made to work. These early embedded vendors also got involved with the Eclipse consortium and then the Eclipse foundation, and helped steer both the framework and some of the most relevant Eclipse projects to meet the needs of embedded developers.

Today in 2008, the Eclipse framework is used by the majority of embedded tools and operating system providers, and finally offers a consistent user interface for embedded developers regardless of which processor, operating system, host development platform or language is being used. In a matter of four years Eclipse has gone from relative obscurity to the de-facto environment for embedded software development. Embedded Systems Conferences will often have an Eclipse track, and even the EclipseCon conference typically has embedded tutorials, showing that Eclipse is important to embedded, and embedded is important to Eclipse.

Doug’s book is an important step for the embedded community as it guides the reader through the important first steps of using Eclipse for embedded development, especially when using an embedded Linux operating system. Although Eclipse is generally intuitive to a novice user, it is somewhat of a paradigm shift for embedded developers who have typically had a very “debugger-centric” view of the world. In Eclipse, the code is the center, and a debugger is just one of a selection of tools that are available to work with the code.

By reading this book from start to finish, the embedded developer will gain a rare insight into everything Eclipse: from its history, through a guided installation of Eclipse and CDT, and then into examples of new features, new projects, plug-ins, and commercial offerings. This will give the embedded developer the confidence and understanding to become very productive very quickly when using this new environment.

The many months that Doug has spent researching and evaluating Eclipse and then carefully detailing his findings in this book will serve our embedded community well, and will help to further propagate the adoption of this unique standard platform for embedded Linux developers across the globe.

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