The Eclipse environment solves the problem of having to maintain your own Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is time consuming and costly. Embedded tools can also be easily integrated into Eclipse. The C/C++CDT is ideal for the embedded community with more than 70% of embedded developers using this language to write embedded code. Eclipse simplifies embedded system development and then eases its integration into larger platforms and frameworks.

In this book, Doug Abbott examines Eclipse, an IDE, which can be vital in saving money and time in the design and development of an embedded system. Eclipse was created by IBM in 2001 and then became an open-source project in 2004. Since then it has become the de-facto IDE for embedded developers. Virtually all of the major Linux vendors have adopted this platform, including MontVista, LynuxWorks, and Wind River.