Like the varied types of Linux, developers of open source come in different stripes too. With that in mind, embedded Linux play MontaVista Software has announced a new toolkit geared for specific application developers.
The MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Pro Application Developer Kit (ADK) is intended to help developers build applications for next generation computing devices.
“Our products are typically used by, generically speaking, two kinds of developers under the software developer umbrella. There is the system or platform developer and then there’s the application developer,” MontaVista spokesperson Joe Samagond told internetnews.com. “Up until now we’ve had
one product offering spanning both of them. Seeing the trend we decided to respond to our customers.”
Samgond went on to explain that up until now, customers had to buy the complete product for both kinds of developers. The new ADK opens up a new realm of opportunity for MontaVista according to Samgond. “From our perspective there are so many more application developers out there, it’s an untapped market opportunity potential for us,” Samagond explained. “We see this as a way of penetrating further into the market place with a product that clearly is fine tuned to a specific developer profile.”
The MontaVista Pro ADK is built around their DevRocket Eclipse-based IDE and provides a full application development tool set. It includes the core libraries and files required to do the development work on Windows, SOLARIS and Linux workstations. The ADK also includes an x86 version, which allows application developers to build apps before the target hardware even exists. “As long as they have an x86 based platform they can start prototyping the application and building it in preparation for getting the
real target hardware” with the ADK, Samagond explained. “Once it comes in they can immediately transfer to the target hardware without a loss of time or efficiency.”
MontaVista has been known since its inception as an embedded Linux
company, though Samagond argued that the company has grown past that definition in the past two years.
“We certainly began in the embedded Linux space but by a combination of customer adoption, customer demand and being on top of market trends we’ve kind of grown out of the embedded market area,” he said.
The catch is how you use the term embedded, he added. Samagond said he thinks the term embedded doesn’t really capture all of the different sectors the company currently services, including telecommunications products and consumer electronics.
“We’ve been serving the telcom market for over two years, been active with the OSDL’s Carrier Grade Linux group and have some leading telecom companies deploying our solutions,” Samagond said.
“We have really focused very heavily on telecommunications and consumer electronics, which is where I expect us to grow and see a lot more adoption as we move forward.”
