Closer And Closer

When I started the EclipseME project over 5 years ago, I could have never imagined how widespread usage of the project would become. I would also never have imagined when Motorola convinced me that EclipseME should form the new base for the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project how well it would all work out. The good news is that we are quickly approaching the first real release of the MTJ project code and I couldn’t be more proud of the results of this collaboration between EclipseME and Motorola. Even cooler is that fact that Sybase has jumped in with some great support (and code!) and RIM has even been helping us make sure that we do our best to keep the project on track for a vendor-agnostic set of tools. The resulting 0.9 MTJ release targeted for an early October release takes the best of EclipseME 1.7.9 plus some neat new features and a whole lot of polishing work.

What’s Inside?

The first release of the MTJ project will be version 0.9. This version will support all of the EclipseME functionality plus more.

• EclipseME 1.7.9 code base (plus Eclipse 3.4 fixes)
• All UEI SDKs are supported
• MPowerplayer SDK is supported
• MicroEmu 2.0.3 SDK is supported
• Import EclipseME Projects
• Import Netbeans Projects
• Preprocessor of JavaME code integrated on the build environment
• Improvements in the Application descriptor editor
• MTJ Perspective to access all MTJ related functionalities
• Enhanced run/debug options
• Automatically discover SDK Javadoc
• Support external preverifier on MIDP SDKs that does not provide a preverifier
• Configure JAR/JAD file names in create package
• Multiple hosts support (win32, linux and macosx)

The version of 0.9 indicates that we aren’t quite ready to guarantee the underlying API’s are ready for consumption by other tool vendors. Take a look at the current plan for improving the EclipseME code base to make it a better platform for tools vendors.

Promoting the MTJ Release

We are looking for a few companies that have been EclipseME and/or MTJ users and might be interested in helping us promote the launch of the MTJ release. If you or your company are interested, please leave a comment or send an email to my Sourceforge email.

What’s Next?

Testing and final polish work is going on now. Whether you are a current EclipseME user or not, please take a few minutes and download the current release candidate from the download page. Let us know if you have any problems. Help us make this release as stable as possible.

The pieces are all in place at this point to start transitioning EclipseME users over to MTJ. The EclipseME project import functionality should make this relatively painless. There are many benefits to making this transition, including:

• Little or no retraining, as the functionality is a direct descendent of EclipseME
• Lots of polish relative to the latest EclipseME release
• A bigger/better support infrastructure with multiple companies backing the MTJ project