Tornado is an integrated environment for software cross-development. It provides an efficient way to develop real-time and embedded applications with minimal intrusion on the target system. Tornado comprises the following elements:

The Tornado interactive development tools include:

The Tornado environment is designed to provide this full range of features regardless of whether the target is resource-rich or resource-constrained. Tornado facilities execute primarily on a host system, with shared access to a host-based dynamic linker and symbol table for a remote target system. Figure 1-1 illustrates the relationships between the principal interactive host components of Tornado and the target system. Communication between the host tools and VxWorks is mediated by the target server and target agent (Figure 1-1).

With Tornado, the cycle between developing an idea and the opportunity to observe its implementation is extremely short. Fast incremental downloads of application code are linked dynamically with the VxWorks operating system and are thus available for symbolic interaction with minimal delay.

A unified macro language called Tcl provides a consistent environment for customization across the entire range of graphical Tornado development tools and the shell.