News

EclipseME 1.1.0: Big News for Developers in Small Spaces

• By John K. Waters
• September 13, 2005

It came and went last month with relatively little fanfare, but the release of the latest version of EclipseME, the open-source plugin for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, was big news for Java developers working in small spaces.

The EclipseME development team describes EclipseME 1.1.0 as a plugin to help J2ME developers create MIDlets, the applications designed to run on wireless Java-enabled devices. It "does the grunt work" of connecting the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit (formerly known as the J2ME Wireless Toolkits) to the Eclipse development environment, which allows developers building applications for resource-constrained environments to focus on building their own apps, rather than worrying about the special needs of J2ME development.

The Sun Java Wireless Toolkit is a toolbox for developing wireless apps based on J2ME's Connected Limited Device Configuration and Mobile Information Device Platform. It's designed to run on cell phones, PDAs and other mobile handheld devices. It includes emulation environments, performance optimization and tuning features, documentation and examples for wireless developers.

EclipseME groups a set of seven plugins, which together provide the base functionality. Structured in a similar way to those in the base Eclipse project, these plugins provide a separation between the low-level implementation and the user interface that works with that implementation.

EclipseME 1.1.0, now available for download, is the first release in a new development line. It comes with a number of enhancements and bug fixes--and one big caveat.

Enhancements

• Rework of the “guessing” of appropriate configurations and profiles
• Support for IMP-1.0 and IMP-NG profiles, thanks to Siemens (still not entirely working)
• Support for Sun’s 2.3 WTK (beta) (RFE 1250670)
• SonyEricsson 2.2.1 support (RFE 1251497)
• Allowing per-project overrides of packaging and obfuscation options (RFE 1044266)
• Support for Nokia Developers Suite for J2ME 3.0 (RFE 1260455)

Bug Fixes

• Fix for problems saving J2ME project properties on Java 5 (Bug 1234066)
• Fix of file encoding issues when reading/writing JAD files and exporting Ant build files (Bug 1251502)
• Possible fix for Bug 1238251

No longer packaging the project-specific settings in the .settings directory (Bug 1234820)

Beginning with Version 1.1.0, EclipseME supports Eclipse 3.1 only; it no longer supports Eclipse 3.0. Consequently, users of Eclipse 3.0 must use Version 1.0.0.

EclipseME may be installed and updated via the EclipseME Update site (as well as the previous archived site). For EclipseME issues, support is available at Eclipse.