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Eclipse Mobile Industry Working Group

MOBILE WG HAS BEEN TERMINATED

Charter

Purpose and Scope

The application development tools used in the mobile phone industry are characterized by vendor-specific offerings. A common development tools integration platform, Eclipse-based or any other technology, has not been adopted across the mobile industry.

A typical Eclipse based mobile application development environment contains components sourced and adapted from many different Eclipse Projects (e.g. CDT, JDT, WTP). There are few mobile specific projects within Eclipse (Mobile Tools for Java, Tools for Mobile Linux) which have not yet gained the momentum or industry leadership for mobile application development because these projects are narrowly focused on specific parts of an overall solution. This constrains the value of the Eclipse platform for mobile application developers, mobile tooling developers, and companies in the mobile industry.

The intent of the Mobile Industry Working Group (MIWG) will be to define, implement and promote a common Mobile Application Development Kit (MADK) which can be easily augmented with handset -specific profiles. The MIWG will be the forum for collaboration between the industry players to define and deliver a common platform, it will facilitate collaboration between existing Eclipse projects applicable to Mobile developers, and initiate new projects based on identified un-met requirements.

Description of Deliverables

The Mobile Industry Working Group (MIWG) will focus on four areas:

  1. The MIWG will define and maintain requirements and a roadmap that defines a complete mobile offering and encourage broader participation for different solution providers.
  2. The MIWG will define the technical requirements for a packaged distribution (e.g. the Eclipse MADK). The MADK will collaborate with other Eclipse projects (e.g. the Eclipse packaging project), or create new projects as needed to implement new technology required for the MADK, to deliver an extensible MADK package.
  3. The MIWG will create a set of best practices and extension mechanisms that simplify the use of Eclipse by a wide range of mobile application developers and tools vendors through a common set of test suites, training materials and documentation.
  4. The MIWG will develop a consistent messaging and promotion program to help raise the awareness of MADK and Eclipse in the mobile industry.

The MIWG will not create or publish a specification as part of its deliverables.

Mobile Industry Working Group (MIWG) Participation Guidelines

The MIWG participation guidelines define the obligations for participants. MIWG participants are expected to full-fill these obligations to be considered in good standing.

Steering Committee Members are required to:

  • Be Strategic or Enterprise member
  • Appoint at least 1 developer/technical resource to contribute to the creation of MIWG technologies, roadmaps and/or technical documents.
  • Regularly participate in all MIWG meetings and provide timely feedback on the MIWG documents.
  • Provide announcement support for the Mobile Application Development Kit (MADK) and ongoing promotion to mobile application developers.

Member Participants are required to:

  • Be an Eclipse Foundation Member (Solution, Associate, or Committer)
  • Regularly participate in all MIWG meeting and provide timely feedback on the MIWG documents.
  • For corporate members, provide announcement support for the Mobile Application Development Kit (MADK) and ongoing promotion to mobile application developers.

Proposed Schedule

  • Q4/08 - Q1/09 Publish MIWG Charter; Gather bigger community and recruit two or more (Expectation of 4) mobile industry players.
  • Q4/08 Define technical roadmap. The goal is to create the following documents by end of December
    • Detailed use-cases outlining the user experience of a "Eclipse Mobile ADK"
    • High level requirements with straw man architecture
    • List of dependencies on existing Eclipse Projects
    • List of missing components (Plug-in granularity) and a brief description of each
  • Q1/Q2 09 - Work with the existing projects (e.g. MTJ, TML and EPP) to create a pre-packaged Eclipse Mobile ADK in Galileo release.

    Create an Eclipse Mobile Integration project to implement the identified missing components. Examples include:

    • implement a missing "SDK download / integration" UI
    • P2 extensions to integrate vendor SDKs into MADK
    • signing / deployment framework which can be extended in MTJ, TML and others
  • Q2/09: Work on Galileo coordinated MADK Release
  • Q3/09: Unify mobile specific features (e.g. Sign, Package, Deploy)
  • Q3/Q4/09: Plan for Post Galileo release

Feedback

Please send comments and feedback to mobile-iwg@eclipse.org. Please also use the mailing list to express your desire to participate in the working group. Go here to subscribe to the mailing list and view the archives.

Industry Working Group Process

The Mobile Industry Working Group will follow the Eclipse Industry Working Group Process.

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