(Press release) Embedded Eiffel announcement

(Press release) Embedded Eiffel announcement

[Alex Prigozhin]

ISE is pleased to announce the release of Embbedded Eiffel,
a version of its popular ISE Eiffel 4 environment specifically
targeted to embedded and real-time developments.

Embedded application development has long had to rely on
low-level tools and techniques. With Embedded Eiffel it is
possible to benefit from the promises of object technology
while satisfying the toughest performance and safety constraints
of embedded systems.

Embedded Eiffel was developed at the request of customers
developing challenging real-time applications, which they felt
were not amenable to traditional techniques, in particular because
of the need to combine multithreading with automatic memory
management

Embedded Eiffel extends the ISE Eiffel 4 environment
with a number of mechanisms of direct use for embedded
system developers. They include:

    - The full EiffelBench object-oriented  development
      environment with its mechanisms for compilation, C generation,
      C and C++ interfaces, browsing, debugging, documentation
      and optimization, as well as libraries and CASE tools.

    - A specifically tailored version of the ISE Eiffel runtime
      designed to minimize the footprint (memory occupation).
      The resulting runtime has executed sophisticated
      object-oriented applications, creating millions of objects,
      with a footprint of less than 110 K of ROM and 70K of RAM.

    - A version of ISE Eiffel 4 that runs on Windriver's
      VxWorks (TM) operating system for host-to-target
      development and debugging. This version can be adapted
      to other real-time operating systems.

    - A special version of ISE Eiffel's garbage collector,
      enabling embedded applications to minimize the use
      of critical memory resources, much more efficiently
      than with traditional manual memory management techniques.

    - A set of flexible utilities to monitor memory usage
      and control garbage collection.

    - A robust multithreading mechanism, combining O-O
      techniques with support for garbage collection.
      In particular, Embedded Eiffel is unique in its
      support for per-thread-garbage-collection, allowing
      a thread to enter a garbage collection step while
      letting all the other threads continue their execution
      undisturbed -- a critical requirement in demanding
      embedded systems.

    - A version of ISE's CECIL (C to Eiffel Call-In Library)
      specifically adapted to real-time projects that must
      integrate complex legacy code in C and/or C++,
      enabling projects to include object-oriented elements
      into existing systems, and to decide where the main control
      will reside: the C/C++ side or the Eiffel side.

The context and requirements of each embedded application
are different. Included with Embedded Eiffel is ISE's support
for tuning the delivery to particular hardware, operating
system variants, compilers, memory requirements and specific
application needs.

With Embedded Eiffel developers can:

    - Draw the software quality benefits, especially reusability,
      reliability and ease of change, that follow from the use of
      a pure object-oriented approach with classes, single
      and multiple inheritance, genericity (parameterized
      classes), polymorphism, dynamic binding and all other
      O-O mechanisms.

    - Seamlessly integrate new object-oriented code with existing
      legacy code in C or C++.

    - Take advantage of hundreds of proven reusable components
      from the ISE Eiffel libraries, in particular EiffelBase
      which covers many data structures and algorithms (lists,
      queues, stacks, trees, tables, iteration, searching),
      eliminating duplication of efforts and sources of bugs.

    - Rely on Eiffel's unique Design by Contract principles to
      equip the software with precise assertions, providing
      a precious mechanism for documenting the software, ensuring
      its correctness, and catching potentially deadly bugs
      at testing rather than operation time.

    - Achieve time and space performance comparable to traditional,
      non-O-O solutions such as C.

    - Address the most critical memory management issues thanks
      to a robust garbage collection mechanism validated
      on applications in the hundreds of thousands of lines,
      which create and collect countless objects.

    - Use advanced host-to-target real-time operating systems
      such as VxWorks.
 
    - Benefit from the portability of ISE Eiffel, running
      with identical source code on all major industry
      platforms including Windows NT, Windows 95, Unix
      (HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, SGI, RS/6000, UnixWare etc.),
      Linux, VMS.
 
    - Benefit from the experience accumulated since 1985
      by large and small projects using ISE Eiffel, backed
      by numerous books, articles, and university programs.

 
Embedded Eiffel is shipping now and supports the latest version
of ISE Eiffel (4.1). For details contact
 
    Interactive Software Engineering Inc.
    Embedded Eiffel Department
    ISE Building, 270 Storke Road, second floor
    Goleta, CA 93117 USA
    Telephone 805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869
    E-mail info@eiffel.com
    http://www.eiffel.com

This announcement is also available at

    http://www.eiffel.com/announcements/embedded.html

which will be updated with details of new developments.

=====================================================
Alexander Prigozhin                  alexp@eiffel.com
ISE Inc.                        http://www.eiffel.com
ISE Building, 2nd floor             tel.:805 685-1006
270 Storke Road                     fax: 805 685-6869
Goleta, CA 93117, USA
=====================================================