News

Codenvy Announces Che-Based IDE for Samsung ARTIK

• By John K. Waters
• April 27, 2016

Codenvy today announced the beta release of a new integrated development environment (IDE) for Samsung's ARTIK Internet of Things (IoT) platform. The two companies are describing the toolset, which is based on the Eclipse Che project, as the first open source cloud IDE dedicated to IoT application development.

Eclipse Che combines a cloud-based software development environment, a workspace server and various plug-ins to form what the Eclipse Foundation has called "an open-source universal developer workspace." Che can also be installed and used as a desktop IDE for a variety of languages, such as Java and JavaScript. When installed as a desktop IDE, Che operates the workspace server as an embedded service.

ARTIK is a platform for the development, deployment and management of IoT systems. Samsung claims that the ARTIK IDE is the first open-source cloud IDE dedicated to IoT application development. The company has not traditionally made their developer technology open source, explained Tyler Jewell, Codenvy CEO and Che project lead, so this partnership is something of a departure for the company.

"A lot of the software development at Samsung is embedded in manufacturing, and the developer ecosystem for embedded systems is very small," Jewell told ADTmag, "and all the tools are very well understood, so there wasn't a huge advantage to open sourcing them. But with the ARTIK IDE, 60 million developers from around the planet don't have to learn anything new to develop software for an embedded system."

Codenvy, which makes on-demand workspaces in the cloud or on premises for a growing list of enterprise customers, is the leading commercial supporter of Eclipse Che. The three-and-a-half-year-old company contributed the original Che codebase to Eclipse, and the IDE platform was officially unveiled as an Eclipse project in March. The Che community is supported by Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, Samsung, WSO2, SmartBear, and others. Since it was unveiled in March, Che has attracted 100,000 downloads, Jewell said.

Codenvy has been working with Samsung since last year, before the official Che release, Jewell said. "They told us that they were developing a major commercial platform around the Internet of Things—the hardware, the software—and they wanted a world-class developer ecosystem to grow up around this IoT platform," he said. "I told them, there's this open source project we're announcing next year that is going to be the next generation development platform for Eclipse. It's completely customizable. Why don't we build the ARTIK IDE on this platform? They were all-in from the beginning."

Samsung's ARTIK modules come in three flavors: Artik 1, a tiny 12mm X 12mm hardware device with Bluetooth and a nine-axis movement sensor; ARTIK 5, which runs a faster 1GHz dual-core processor and includes on-board storage; and ARTIK 10, which is powered by an eight-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. ARTIK 10 also comes with Wi-Fi and Zigbee connectivity. All of the ARTIK modules include a secure-element—a tamper-resistant environment in which app code and data are securely stored. Samsung is providing an IoT software stack so developers can get up and running quickly.

The ARTIK IDE supports device recovery and management; multiple programming languages, including Java, Python, JavaScript, C# and C++; and because it's browser-based, it requires no installation.

Eclipse Che is part of a larger Eclipse Foundation initiative. In 2014 the Foundation unveiled Eclipse Cloud Development (ECD), which aims to create an open source community focused on cloud development. The ECD is a top-level project today, comprising several others, including Eclipse Orion, a browser-based open tool integration platform; Eclipse Flux, a new message-based architecture for cloud-based developer tooling; Eclipse Dirigible, a cloud development toolkit providing development tools and runtime environment; and Eclipse Che.