Developing an Open Source Integrated Development Environment for a Mobile Device

Software development can be eased with an integrated development environment (IDE), which allows the use of different individual tools from one single development platform. Unfortunately, when developing software for a particular embedded system, the development of an IDE for a certain device can be expensive, as the development of an IDE requires a lot of resources. In this paper, we introduce our experiences regarding the development of an integrated development for a mobile device, Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Our goal was to aim at a fullyfledged IDE with the lowest possible costs. In order to accomplish this, we turned to open source development communities, and targeted our effort to the integration of already existing components into a simple yet practical IDE. Towards the end of the paper, we also discuss the effort it took to develop such a system.