Eclipse has tools for today's mobile phones

Project lead Christian Kurzke works for Motorola in San Jose, and emphasized to ZDNet that the new MTJ 0.9 release is not designed for the Android, LiMo, or open source Symbian phones.

"There are other Eclipse projects that focus on that," he said.

"For example parallel to the MPJ MTJ project there's a Tools for Mobile Linux project, which is currently building momentum and creating a similar environment to develop native Linux applications using Eclipse."

"My hope is that, in the future, with Android being open source, we can find developers who will maintain an Android envrionment. It's not our scope. It would have to be a new project in the Eclipse Foundation."

So what can happen with the new tools? 

One key improvement is a Java preprocessor for use by traditional Java ME developers. There are also import wizards so Netbeans and Eclipse ME developers can port their code to MTJ.

One final point. The .9 release number should be construed to mean this is beta code. It's not. "At its current state it's where Eclipse's ME 1.7.9 was. It's pretty solid."