Updates in the EclipseME World

It is amazing to realize that it has already been two months since the last EclipseME release. There are probably a few people watching the project and wondering what is going on. Since there isn’t a new release to advertise, it seemed a good time to provide some updated status on the project. Despite other things getting in the way, such as the “real world” there is still work going on with the project. Read on for more details.

Preprocessing

The preprocessor saga has been going on for a very long time. For a bit of background, feel free to check out this and this. From the outside, it may appear that nothing is going on with this project, but work continues on the preprocessing functionality. For those that are interested in watching the development, you may want to take a look at the “preprocessor” branch in the EclipseME CVS. Because this functionality is definitely a work in progress, I would warn people to be very careful playing around with this. I won’t even guarantee it will compile from time to time. This work is taking place on a branch in order to allow the freedom to do the work without breaking the main development branch.

Until the time that the Eclipse JDT team provides the framework necessary to do preprocessing “correctly” (see Bug 116143 for full details), EclipseME must find a way to provide this functionality within the current JDT tools. A lot of time was spent trying to build a solution that takes advantage of the Eclipse File System to implement the preprocessing functionality. Unfortunately, due to various constraints placed on the EFS support, the approach had to be abandoned.

The current approach is to use a secondary “hidden” project to handle the preprocessing functionality. This approach is not at the top of my list, as it feels like somewhat of a hack. Hack or not, it appears at this point to be the only viable approach without further help from the JDT.

Mobile Tools for Java

I have also been spending time on the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project. Although I’m not coding directly for this project at this time, MTJ is taking advantage of lots of EclipseME code. I have been participating in the planning, design and architecture discussions with the goal of eventually making the MTJ tools even better than EclipseME.

The MTJ project has recently released the second milestone of the upcoming 0.7 release. I would like to urge all EclipseME users to take some time to download MTJ and take it out for a spin. In the future, it is likely that EclipseME will be phased out with appropriate migration support to MTJ. It is in the interest of all EclipseME users to make sure MTJ is ready for you. Make sure to write bugs and feature requests using Eclipse Bugzilla, letting the whole MTJ team know your thoughts and concerns. I would suggest that you use a separate Eclipse installation and workspace to do your testing to avoid any potential conflicts.

Stick Around

I want to take a minute to thank the users of EclipseME as well as the developers that have contributed to the project. Without that interest, this project would have died quite a while ago. EclipseME is not dead and will continue to advance, although it will likely be at a slower pace.