[dsdp-mtj-dev] MTJ Working Plan

["Paula Gustavo-WGP010" <wgp010@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi MTJers,

Since the end of last year we have been evaluating possible directions
to go forward with MTJ. One direction that initially seemed to be
unlikely now appears to be the most technically feasible way to go
forward. We would like to share it with you and hear your feedback.

The proposed direction is to use the latest EclipseME (1.7.7 or newer)
as the code base for the MTJ "reboot". There are a couple of advantages
of this approach that are listed below:
- Eclipse is about communities and EclipseME already has a very large
user community. This means it has been tested by a large number of users
and we thought that it would be easier to create a developer community
around it; 
- All major device manufactures today use or point to EclipseME as a
possible JavaME development environment. With current MTJ code base, we
might not be able in a short or medium term to provide a viable
alternative to EclipseME, and we expect most commercial users, will
continue to use EclipseME (including Motorola). There is no big user nor
developer community around the current MTJ codebase, and it will be
really hard to create one if everyone is still using EclipseME
- Craig Setera will be one of the MTJ committers; the benefits are that
he understands deeply the code, and he also has a lot of
experience/feedback from "real users" about desired future features.
This very greatly reduces the risk of developing a MTJ 1.0. The goal is
to provide a unified community/codebase for EclipseME and MTJ in the
future.

We propose the following steps in order to achieve this goal. We can
break those steps according to some main milestones later: 
- MTJ 0.8 (EclipseME 1.7.7 refactored) 
	- Refactor all EclipseME code to follow eclipse code standards 
	- Refactor all EclipseME documentation 
	- Eclipse Foundation Intellectual Property review on new code
contribution
	- Commit code to Eclipse foundation Subversion / CVS 
- MTJ 0.9 (Increase flexibility) 
	- Refactor code to break dependencies between UI and Core 
	- Define a plugin model to support more flexibility. Focus on: 
	- Pre-verify 
	- Signing 
	- Packaging 
	- Deploying 
	- Device Manager 
	- Obfuscation 
	- Preprocessing 
	- Include an API layer between UI and Core (possibly with code
from current MTJ 0.7)
	- Define Extension Points to implement the API layer 
- MTJ 1.0 (add back features from MTJ 0.7) 
	- Refactor and move code from MTJ 0.7 to new code line 
	- Signing solution 
	- Import other JavaIDE projects (Netbeans, CarbideJ,
MotodevStudio)
	- MIDlets templates 

MTJ 1.0 will have all features that we plan to include on MTJ first
release. Items like a "GUI Builder" for Midlets are currently out of the
MTJ 1.0 scope - unless new developers want to join the project and help
with the implementation.

Thanks,
gustavo