A group of major mobile phone handset makers aim to simplify mobile application development by working together to create a standard set of development tools on top of Eclipse, a popular open source integrated development environment (IDE).

Eclipse, which was originally created by IBM to provide a robust IDE for Java development, is now managed by the non-profit Eclipse Foundation and has become one of the most widely used development tools in the software industry. Eclipse is highly extensible by design and the source code is available under the permissive Eclipse Public License. These factors have made it a useful starting point for numerous companies that have adapted it for their own SDKs and custom development environments.

Although Eclipse is popular—particularly in the mobile space—the growing number of third-party adopters has created some fragmentation. Currently, in order to do Eclipse-based mobile development for multiple mobile platforms, developers need to obtain a wide range of disparate Eclipse plugin components and specialized SDKs from various software vendors. This can be especially problematic when the vendor-specific tools require different versions of Eclipse or conflicting underlying dependencies.

Eclipse has grown an increasingly robust internal package management system to ameliorate some of these challenges, but it is far from a panacea. In an effort to simplify tooling challenges and reduce barriers to entry for new developers, the handset makers are going to collaborate on shared infrastructure and consolidate parts of their development tool stacks. The project, which is called Pulsar, will be driven by an Eclipse Foundation workgroup. The companies that have committed to participate include Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, IBM, and Genuitech.

We discussed the Pulsar initiative with Dino Brusco, Motorola's senior director of development platforms and services. He explained that Pulsar will make the various mobile SDKs discoverable and easy to obtain directly through p2, Eclipse's powerful built-in software deployment system.

The goal is to make it possible for developers to download a single environment and simply select which platforms they want to target. The environment will than automatically pull in the required dependencies, sparing the developer from having to manually download and install a bunch of different SDKs.

The first major iteration of the project, which will be delivered alongside the upcoming Galileo release of Eclipse, will focus mainly on Java ME. In addition to providing a streamlined deployment system for offering the SDKs through Eclipse, the companies are also collaborating on shared development tools like a generic framework for emulators so that each vendor won't have to reinvent the wheel. Brusco says that application signing is another area where the Pulsar participants could potentially converge on a standard set of tools.

The project also entails a joint effort to devise and document best practices for mobile development so that the handset makers can collectively provide authoritative guidance to developers.

Although Pulsar is currently limited to Java ME, Brusco says that there are plans to extend it to other development technologies in the future. Web widgets—applications built with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS—are a becoming a popular approach to cross-platform mobile development. Brusco says that tool convergence for Web technologies, leveraging Eclipse's Firefly project, is the next logical step for the Pulsar initiative. Native development toolkits could eventually be supported too.

Pulsar will likely be viewed by mobile application developers as a welcome advance in tool support. As the smartphone market evolves and the number of platforms continues to increase, developers will need all the help that they can get to simplify the task of making their applications reach the broadest possible audience.

Listing image by Michiel Jelijs