Martin followed up the MTJ announcement with Christian Kurzke, project lead for MTJ and a developer tools architect at Motorola, and found out what's new and different about MTJ, as well as how to get started. As Paul Krill reported yesterday morning, Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java Project (MTJ) is a set of plug-ins for the Eclipse IDE offering capabilities for developing embedded or Java ME (Micro Edition) applications. Yesterday afternoon, I followed up with Christian Kurzke, project lead for MTJ and a developer tools architect at Motorola. MTJ now includes what used to be two separate open source projects, Eclipse ME and Mobile Tools for Java.I asked Christian what’s special about MTJ and how it compares to other mobile Java development tools, such as NetBeans and the Android SDK. He listed several concrete items: MTJ supports a Java pre-processor, Antenna, which makes it possible to do conditional coding to handle multiple targets. This is a better option than handling the differences between handsets entirely by branching versions in your source code control system. MTJ supports more emulators and SDKs than NetBeans. The Android SDK is, of course, dedicated to Android phones. MTJ lacks the GUI builder included in NetBeans. On the other hand, few developers write to LCD UI, which is what’s supported by that GUI builder. MTJ has similar capabilities to the Android SDK, but the two are not compatible. “I really wish that Android had come out after MTJ, and that the two were compatible,” said Kurzke. “I hope to discuss remedying this situation with the Android developers in the near future.” I had tried to upgrade my Eclipse installation with MTJ before our call, but hadn’t succeeded in finding the correct URLs. Kurzke provided some after our call, by e-mail:If you want to try out the latest MTJ release, you can find it here:https://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/ Most likely the file you’ll want to download is here: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/dsdp/mtj/downloads/drops/R-0.9-200810141345/dsdp-mtj-runtime-incubation-0.9.zip The download is a zip file, which is installed by extracting it into the Eclipse directory. Alternatively the above link also has a “Update Manager” link. After you install, you need to install an “SDK”, which can be either the Wireless Toolkit, or a commercial SDK. For a fully integrated “turn key” solution (Eclipse + MTJ + SDK/Emulator), you can also try out the freely available product. This comes with Emulator already integrated: (free registration required) https://developer.motorola.com/docstools/motodevstudio/javame/downloads/I’m VERY interested to hear real world developer feedback for the project. Please encourage people to send feedback, praise, beer and pizza to our mailing list: dsdp-mtj-dev@eclipse.org View the archive here: https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/dsdp-mtj-dev/maillist.htmlIn a follow-up email, Kurzke gave me the instructions for updating within Eclipse:MTJ is not part of the “release train”, so it’s not on the Ganymede update site. For now you have to add a “new Update Site” by using the Eclipse Software Update and going to “Available Software” -> “New Site” and entering the Update Site URL: https://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/mtj/updates/0.9/stable/ Software Development