Nokia pushing mobile development at Eclipse
Published: 22 Sep 2005 14:10 BST
Nokia has increased its level of involvement in the Eclipse project by becoming a board member and strategic developer. It will take the lead in developing tools for mobile applications based on the Eclipse platform. One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.
As part of the move, Nokia will donate some of its own code to Eclipse, and dedicate resources to generating new tools for the platform. The company wants to be able to create applications based on the MIDP and CDC standards for Java, although in the longer term it also intends to use Eclipse for other languages.
While many of Nokia's mobile phones are J2ME compatible, others are not powerful enough to run Java applications. In creating Eclipse-based tools to build applications for all its phones, Nokia is increasing the number of potential developers for its platforms. "By working closely with Eclipse, and proposing a new open source mobile development tools project, we will provide the more than two million registered developers in our Forum Nokia programme with complete integrated tool packages optimised for Nokia platforms" said Pertti Korhonen, Nokia's executive vice-president and chief technology officer in a statement.
Nokia has had its own toolset for its phones for some time, but last year became interested in Eclipse as a platform and announced support for the Eclipse IDE in its own SDK and tools. It joins an increasing number of companies developing different tools based on Eclipse, with a certain amount of one-upmanship taking place between some companies. While Eclipse itself is written in Java, many tools for other languages have been developed using the platform, and even some tools not related to programming such as BIRT are in development.
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