In todays highly competitive business world, noone has the luxury of working on a single task at a time anymore. Instead, we all make expensive context switches between very different tasks all the time. And, I guess, we all are searching for more efficient time management methods (GTD, anyone?) and tools that help us to reduce the information overload. Mylyn is one of those.
What is Mylyn? Mylyn is a task-focused interface for Eclipse that makes multi-tasking easy. It makes tasks a first class part of Eclipse, importing them from external task repositories, like the codeBeamer task and bug trackers, for instance. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors your work activity, and uses this task context to focus the user interface on the task-at-hand. This improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation.
A Mylyn connector for codeBeamer, Intland’s ALM software, has been available for years now. Last December, we decided to re-engineer it from ground up. Why? The new version incorporates long awaited changes based on the first hand experience of our customers and our internal development team, and it will also establish the basis for future improvements. This is where the story starts to get more interesting.
In the next iteration (due to summer 2010), we will add Mylyn Team Support features to HgEclipse. It will enable navigating from change sets to tasks, generate automatic commit messages and working with patches. Mylyn already has it for Subversion and CVS, but for Mercurial it is not available at the moment.
OK, let’s get back to the spring release. The new codeBeamer Mylyn Connector beta will be out in April 2010. Version highlights:
- Support for Eclipse 3.5
- Task contexts saved to, shared on and restored from the codeBeamer server
- Wiki markup support
- Streamlined UI: easier and faster configuration of queries
So you say you don’t have Mylyn installed? Well, chances are you actually have. The Galileo Eclipse package is shipped with Mylyn by default. In case you are using an earlier version of Eclipse, see the link in Resources.
Resources
- Mylyn project homepage
- Download Mylyn
- HgEclipse project homepage: a plugin providing support for the highly popular Mercurial distributed version control system within the Eclipse IDE
