Over on Chris Aniszczyk’s blog, he mentions that the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java and Eclipse Pulsar projects have passed the Galileo release review. Although Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java isn’t quite 1.0, it is getting very close. This is the culmination of the work I started in 2003 on the EclipseME project . When I started that little hobby project, I would not have dreamed that it would have more than 700,000 downloads from Sourceforge or become the base of the official Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project.

Thanks to the help from Motorola and the other members of the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project, the EclipseME code has grown and matured far beyond what I could have done in my own free time. There are many more support options now available and users should find a much smoother environment. If you need any proof of the commitment from members of the MTJ development team, take a look at the developers mailing list request to begin work on the first service release beyond MTJ 1.0.

I’m looking forward to continuing my involvement with the MTJ project going forward both as a code committer and as a voice for the average mobile developer. I want to thank all of the users of EclipseME over the years for their continued support and urge you to make the jump to MTJ if you have not already. The final Galileo release is scheduled to be available on June 24th, but the versions available right now are pretty close to what you can expect at that time. The differences between this first MTJ version and the last EclipseME release make it a very worthwhile upgrade to your development environment.

Note that I’m in the process of moving all of my Eclipse, MTJ and EclipseME blogging over to my new site . Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Gustavo de Paula (Motorola) will be presenting a Webinar about the the current and future status of the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project, on Wednesday, April 22. His webinar will cover some of the new features of MTJ since the project was restarted based on the last release of the EclipseME project.

For more information and to register, see the Eclipse Live announcement .

Release 0.9.1 of the MTJ project is available to download from the MTJ website. You can access the release from:

Download site: http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/downloads/drops/R-0.9.1-200812231340/index.html
Via update manager: http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/updates/0.9/stable/

Below is a list of the main new features that are available in the new release:

• Multidevice support: each MTJ project can now have several devices associated to it
• Preprocessor enhancements: there is code assist on the preprocessor tags
• MIDlet Unit Test Support: it is possible to create unit tests cases/suite to MIDlet classes. The tests can be packed with the MIDlet suite
• MIDlet localization: There is now one option on the MIDlet suite to localize all Strings that are used on the MIDlet Suite
• MIDlet suite libraries: There is a new extension point that can be used by content developers to provider libraries that can be packed with the MIDlet suite
• Import Symbol Set definitions: Besides creating symbols and symbols set, MTJ users are now able to import predefined symbol sets based on Antenna format
• Content assist on the JAD Editor

In this release, besides the valuable community contributions during conference calls, email discussions and bug reports, there were code contributions from the following companies:

• Craig Setera (individual)
• Inlogic Software ltd
• Motorola
• Nokia
• Sybase

Thanks for the hard work of everyone that contributed to this release.  The project will be scheduling a call in early January to talk about MTJ 1.0 scope.

I have managed to get behind on the state of the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java code. In an effort to catch up, I downloaded the latest code to my Ubuntu box and started up a runtime workbench. At that point, I needed to import my devices into the workspace and pointed to my Sun 2.5.2 Wireless Toolkit installation. To my surprise, it failed to be recognized. Given that I had fixed a similar problem prior to the MTJ 0.9.0 release, I was surprised to see a return of the problem.
Before digging too far into the MTJ code, I decided to see that the emulator was actually working correctly. I changed into the WTK emulator directory and attempted to run the emulator directly.

setera@ubuntu-laptop:~/software/wtk252/bin$ ./emulator
./emulator: 26: /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/bin/java: not found

Ah Ha! My emulator installation is broken. What’s going on?
(more…)

I’m happy to note that two of our Mobile Tools for Java talks have been accepted for EclipseCon 2009.  Our long talk “ MTJ: Taking Mobile Java Developers To The Next Level ” and the short talk “ DSDP Mobile Tools for Java New and Noteworthy ” were both accepted.  I especially want to thank Christian Kurzke and Motorola for allowing me to participate in these talks.

I’m still working out the details of my travel arrangements.  With any luck I will have some extra time to talk to those that may be interested in more details of MTJ.  If you have any interest in using or consuming MTJ, take some time to stop by these presentations.