OTTAWA, CANADA:  The Eclipse Foundation today announced Pulsar, a new industry initiative to define and create a standard mobile application development tools platform.

The Pulsar initiative will focus on four areas:

* The creation of the packaged distribution called Eclipse Pulsar Platform;
* A technical roadmap to advance the capabilities of the platform;
* A set of best practices which includes documentation and test suites; and
* Education and outreach to drive adoption of Pulsar with mobile application developers.

As part of the roadmap, Pulsar will support major mobile development environments such as JavaME, mobile Web technologies and native mobile platforms.

Today, mobile developers are required to use a variety of software development kits (SDK) to develop their applications for different handset manufacturers.

This presents an unnecessary burden for developers who want to create applications for a range of devices from different manufacturers. Pulsar will define a common set of Eclipse-based tools in a packaged distribution that will interoperate with the various handset SDKs. This will enable developers to stay within one familiar development environment while creating mobile applications that target multiple device families, the release added.

The first release of Pulsar Platform is expected to be available at the end of June 2009 and will be part of the Eclipse Galileo annual release.

“By providing a common development environment defined collaboratively across the mobile industry, the Eclipse Pulsar Platform is enabling more developers to create innovative applications for multiple devices,” said Dino Brusco, senior director, Developer Platforms & Services, Motorola. “This initiative aligns with Motorola’s commitment to provide developers the most advanced and flexible tools available.”

“Nokia is proud to participate in the Pulsar initiative, as it brings new energy to improving the mobile centric features of Eclipse,” said Rich Bartlett, director, Development Tools, Nokia. “We see this a key step forward in making Eclipse a premier environment for mobile development, supporting our efforts to attract innovative applications and services to our smartphone platforms.”

“This industry initiative drives the leveraging of a state of the art development platform, so that the global development community will be empowered to create applications easily, quickly and securely that provide rich mobile experiences for consumers on their mobile phones,” said Vildan Hasanbegovic, development tools product manager of Sony Ericsson. “Sony Ericsson fully supports this as we regard it as a key step to increase the speed to market for applications and content from our developer communities and through our channels to consumers.”

“The Pulsar initiative is a great example of how open source can foster industry collaborations,” explains Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. “Congratulations to the major handset manufacturers Motorola, Nokia, RIM and Sony Ericsson for driving this initiative to collaborate on the definition of a common mobile application development tools platform.”