Eclipse Hibachi Project Unites Ada Suppliers in Common Environment

To initiate the project, Aonix has contributed the source code of AonixADT, an existing commercial Eclipse plug-in technology that supports Aonix ObjectAda as well as GNAT tool chains on a variety of host and target platforms, as the initial code for the project. AonixADT is based on JDT and CDT, the Java and C Eclipse development toolkits. Additional contributions to Hibachi are being actively solicited by the project team.

Tom Grosman of Aonix was selected as project lead, supported by Adam Haselhuhn of Aonix, Lisa Jett of DDC-I, Mandy McMillion and David Philips of CohesionForce, and other industry participants. Other organizations planning to contribute to Hibachi include OC Systems, Praxis High Integrity Systems, existing opensource Ada projects, as well as universities and interested individuals. The Hibachi Project is mentored by CDT Project Lead Doug Schaefer of QNX and DSDP Lead Doug Gaff of Wind River.

“The Eclipse Hibachi project will promote wider adoption of Eclipse-based development by the Ada community, which includes many major high-integrity projects worldwide,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Formally adopting Ada functionality into Eclipse will encourage easier integration of Ada development alongside other development tools and language platforms supported by Eclipse. Eclipse provides an ideal solution, giving Ada developers a universal open-source platform with a broad ecosystem of plug-ins.”

“Aonix is excited to play a central role in Hibachi and to extend our involvement in the Eclipse community for the benefit of our customers and Ada users in general,” said Dave Wood, Aonix VP marketing. “For years, we have been committed to Eclipse solutions for the benefit of our Java and Ada customers, and our ability to provide proven sources and project leadership to help launch the Hibachi project represents the next stage of our commitment.”

The Hibachi project aims to become the benchmark Ada IDE, by which all other Ada environments are measured, and the first choice for Ada developers. Functionally, Hibachi will shadow the ongoing development evolution of CDT. The first year development will focus on supporting multiple Ada compiler technologies, offering closer evolution with the CDT architecture, providing useful and stable APIs, and integrating with the Eclipse DSDP/TM and DSDP/DD projects. Subsequent phases will emphasize implementation of new and improved functionality, such as refactoring and analysis tools, and ever-increasing integration with more varied tools.

Support for toolchain extension points with integrations available from multiple Ada vendors is anticipated early in 2008. Re-architecture work to take advantage of the latest CDT developments and create robust and stable APIs will result in incremental releases in mid-2008, and the first major version (v1.0) is scheduled to take advantage of improvements of DSDP in the Ganymede update later in the year.

In addition, Hibachi will provide an open framework for the integration and use of other tools used during the lifecycle of large-scale Ada application development. These tools include but are not limited to analysis, modeling, testing, verification, documentation, refactoring, and configuration management.

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Aonix offers mission- and safety-critical solutions primarily to the military and aerospace, telecommunications and transportation-related industries. Aonix delivers the leading high-reliability, real-time embedded virtual machine solution for running Java™ programs deployed today and has the largest number of certified Ada applications at the highest level of criticality. Headquartered in San Diego, CA and Paris, France, Aonix operates sales offices throughout North America and Europe in addition to offering a network of international distributors. For more information, visit www.aonix.com.