It finally happened. After 7 years of working on EclipseME, my little hobby project is finally growing up and becoming the official implementation of the Eclipse Mobile Tools for the Java Platform (MTJ) project. This is really a big win for everyone involved with EclipseME. For users, it means more support from the larger MTJ project team. For myself, it means… more support from the larger MTJ project team. For device manufacturer and carriers, it means that there is an official Eclipse Foundation project to interact with. This brings with it all of the benefits of a well-organized foundation that really understands the needs of corporations when working with open source software. With the involvement from Motorola, Nokia, Research In Motion and other device manufacturers, MTJ should be able to move forward much more quickly than it could move with the small EclipseME development team.

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Version 1.7.0 had a number of builder problems that have caused people quite a bit of trouble. Because of those problems, it has been determined that it would be better to remove that version until a fixed version can be made available. Version 1.7.0 has been removed from Sourceforge and the update site has been reverted to version 1.6.8. If you are currently using version 1.7.0 without problems, you are free to continue using the release until the next release is available. If you are having problems and would like to revert, please follow the instructions to remove the 1.7.0 release and follow the standard installation instructions to install version 1.6.8.

I apologize for the problems with the 1.7.0 release and hope to get a fixed release out soon.

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.

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I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve decided to delay the preprocessing work. I had been planning on trying to get it into the next release of EclipseME, but I’m finding there is still too much work to get it in and I just don’t have enough time to do it justice. In addition, there is an ever-growing backlog of bugs for the project that really need to be addressed. I’m going to be putting the preprocessing support on the back burner and put together a bug fix release in the meantime. The next release will be almost entirely bug fixes, although I did find time a while back to create support for the mpowerplayer emulator, which should help those running on non-Windows platforms.

I apologize to those that are waiting on the preprocessing support. I definitely understand the need for this function. Unfortunately, getting this all together has proven to be very difficult. I also understand that many people use this tool every day for their work and that it needs to be rock solid. Unfortunately, rock solid support like this takes a lot of time.

Even though it may seem that EclipseME is dead, that really is not the case. Between soccer (coaching) and switching to a new job, I’ve just been incredibly busy lately. I wish I was finding more time to dedicate to EclipseME and hope to get more time going forward. The good news is that there is still slow forward progress being made. To prove that is the case, here is a screenshot of some of the work in progress for handling some of the device fragmentation issues.

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