Small summary of a couple of projects seen during the second conference day:
- eRCP (abbreviation of embedded Rich Client Platform): this version, which is a subset of RCP, is targetted towards mobile devices and is also based upon OSGi. eRCP bundles light version of components from RCP, like eSWT, eJFace and eWorkbench and eUpdate. OSGi and the JVM is tuned for mobile devices and therefore has a smaller memory footprint than for a normal OSGi application, along with some other optimizations and tweaks. The aim is to get the benefits from RCP, while slightly adapted for mobile devices: multiplatform, native look & feel and better compatibility between devices than MIDP.
- eSWT (embedded SWT): I talked yesterday about RAP for AJAX application and RWT. eSWT is a similar project, but targetted this time for mobile devices. eSWT is also a subset of SWT and is split in 3 components for better memory usage: Core eSWT (required), Expanded eSWT and Mobile Extension eSWT, the two latter being optional. Like SWT, eSWT uses native widgets from the underlying operating system, although a difference is that much of the code within eSWT is native code, giving rise to much better performances than a basic wrapping of OS widgets (a critical factor for mobile devices). eSWT implementations exist already for a number of mobile device platforms, like Windows Mobile and Symbian series 80, among others. A version for Symbian series 60 is ongoing and should be released shortly, along with the corresponding SDK. During the talk, a demo of a simple news reader was made, where a version using SWT was running on a desktop computer, a second version using RWT was run as an AJAX application, and finally a version using eSWT was running on a mobile device. Impressive to see that a single code base can be used to produce 3 applications running each on a completely different platform, although at least small modifications of the code base are needed.
- Ganymatic: there is a couple of challenges for building an Eclipse distro, mainly managing the dependencies and running basic tests to be sure that plug-in A does not break the API of plug-in B when combined. This project, based on the package manager Buckminster aims at making such a process easier by providing an integrated infrastructure. This would enable to generate a distro automatically by fetching the required base packages, installing recursively their dependencies, running a number of automated tests to be sure everything is in place, making the binary build and reporting possible errors. The project will be used in particular for next year Eclipse’s release called Ganymede.
- BMW CarIT: Eclipse is here used as a platform along several lines. For instance an Autosar IDE has been realized based on Eclipse RCP (using technologies like EMF, GEF, OAW), providing a modeling tool for developing Autosar applications. There is also the embedded development in C++ done with Eclipse CDT, where a custom compiler has been quickly integrated, including error/warnings annotations, taking advantage of the openness and extensibility of Eclipse as an IDE. Some other projects regarding Eclipse have also been presented (like an automated deployment solution).
- Medany Platform: this is a project developed in France on top of Eclipse RCP and eRCP. The idea is here to use mobile devices (PDA) to aquire medical data and synchronize them with some servers. eRCP is used on the mobile devices while RCP on the server. The project is heavily based on Model Driven Architecture (EMF, OAW) and some other Eclipse projects (WTP, DTP).
I guess, that’s it for this year. More information can be found on the Eclipse Summit 2007 website.