EclipseCon is still largely fueled by enterprise sponsors, but looking around there were many sponsors, presenters, and attendees from embedded companies - with significant developments for them as well.

The usual embedded suspects were there. One interesting note is the CDT project lead, Doug Schaefer, made the jump from QNX to Wind River at the end of last year. And we already talked about the Community Award for Wind River Workbench. The LynuxWorks crew was at the event in force as well.

Other embedded developments of note:
Dave Russo of TI (founder of Spectron Microsystems before they were purchased by TI) gave some details on the Real Time Software Components (RTSC) project. Russo says developers are getting pushed by platform diversity and performance constraints, and RTSC is seeking to open up TI’s popular XDCtools and make it easier to “write-once, deploy widely” with C-based reusable components and CDT integration. RTSC is looking to extend the model into what Russo calls dual-existence code: both target code, and meta code running on a rich client platform. This provides more opportunity for design-time optimization, supporting both static and runtime use.

Don Dunne, Ryan Brooks, and Jeff Phillips of Boeing presented the Open System Engineering Environment (OSEE) project, a lifecycle environment tieing a requirements development environment to an application framework and configuration management tools, with validation and verification tools in the works. Phillips made the observation: “We built a lot of tools, but found they were all disconnected.” OSEE features a user-definable data model, with customizable views and preferences, and extensiblilty as expected in Eclipse tools. Brooks pointed out their first customer, the US Army Apache helicopter program, is excited because they get not only the deliverable data but the OSEE tool to view and manage it with. Much of the interest in OSEE is coming from automakers, who also develop complex platforms.

Quite a few vendors are offering tools to develop on mobile phones. RIM introduced a tool for developing BlackBerry apps, and Klocwork offered a tool for Symbian apps. Motorola discussed both TmL (tools for mobile Linux) and MTJ (mobile tools for Java).

The days of news around the basic Eclipse IDE in embedded development are well past, and we’ll now see more robust application development frameworks for embedded software continue to emerge from the Eclipse community.