Tasktop

Coté has posted an interview with me and Ian Skerrett on RedMonk Radio 

We discuss how the Eclipse ecosystem is driven by vendor-neutral open source frameworks such as Mylyn, and the ways in which commercial products like Tasktop build on that. Some interesting points that came up are: the various ways in which vendors decide on what to open, the split between open and closed source Mylyn connectors, the role of the community, and the benefits of Eclipse’s governance model. We wrap up the conversation with some thoughts on OSGi and its use in runtimes such as the SpringSource Application Platform.

And yes, Coté is now sporting a cool sticker on his infamous laptop, which admittedly does not take a less is more approach to stickers.

There’s a light at the end of the 3.0 tunnel that Mylyn committers have been in—the light is a fast approaching train called Ganymede.

Here’s a status update for both early adopters and integrators. Since last June’s Mylyn 2.0 and Europa release we’ve had three releases, and the ecosystem around Mylyn has evolved from a handful of connectors to nearly two dozen. Since the Mylyn 2.3 release we have been focused on incorporating integrators’ feedback in order to produce the revised Mylyn 3.0 APIs. Below is a summery of the Mylyn 3.0 endgame for interested early adopters and API integrators.

Early Adopters

Once Ganymede RC1 is released next week you can start experimenting with Mylyn 3.0. However, note that your connector may not be ported, and as such we do not recommend updating your Eclipse until you know that the connector you are using has been ported. Once Mylyn 3.0 RC3 is released on June 4th we would like as many early adopters to move to it as possible, and will post the list of available connectors at that time.

Integrators

Mylyn 3.0 will support both Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4, and as such will replace Mylyn 2.x. The Mylyn 3.0 APIs are much simpler, encapsulate considerably more common behavior in the framework and expose much less internals (in part thanks to the great API tools in Eclipse 3.4). This means that extensions will be more robust and easier to implement and maintain.

We will be working on the Javadocs and Porting Guide next week, so for projects outside of Eclipse.org, RC2 or RC3 is a good time to start porting. The release schedule has had no significant changes since July. We will continue incorporating integrator feedback, and the best place to track progress and make general comments is bug 227660.

Tasks API

The JIRA connector has been ported, and Bugzilla will be ported by next week. Due to the extent of the changes with org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.core, and the benefit of having connectors ported as soon as possible, we will be offering additional porting assistance. If you’re interested in closer assistance, let us know via bug 227660.

Context API

The changes in the Context API are straightforward, and you may be able to do most of the bridge porting by organizing imports, then looking to the Java bridge, and referring to the porting guide if needed. We will update the porting guide with the answer to any question that comes up, so please don’t hesitate to ask as it will help others. The bulk of the changes here had to do with simplifying the API and hiding internals.

Team API

The changes are minor and porting should be straightforward. The bulk of the changes had to do with ensuring that Team extensions could be redistributed without requiring Team/CVS or the Eclipse SDK.

Happy hacking!

For those that haven’t had a chance to attend the madness that is JavaOne, I think the following picture sums it up. There is a massive amount of people waiting in massive lines to attend massive talks. I snapped this shot while walking into my Mylyn: code at the speed of thought talk. The people at the front of the line had been standing there for way too long and looked very bored. The talk had filled up at pre-registration and had around 700 attendees. But once it was underway, the crowd and questions were great. For those interested in seeing this talk, I plan on recording it and making a webcast available this summer.

For me the conference started with the RedMonk Community One day, which was ridiculously located in a huge hall, in the middle of a never ending lunch line. Amazingly the RedMonk guys managed to get a lively crowd engaged in an RIA discussion, despite the fact that you needed a microphone to speak to anyone more than three feet away from you.

With a lack of interesting announcements from major vendors the news that dominated for me was the excitement around the SpringSource Application Platform. The SpringSource booth appeared to have a permanent queue of people attached to it and the interest in OSGi was palpable. Here’s a picture of a rare quiet moment before the exhibit hall opened. On the left is Christian Dupuis, who we’re working with in Vancouver on the tool support. Alongside him are Rob Harrop and Adrian Colyer, the very entertaining SpringSource gurus who had more demo laptops than hands.

My favorite event at JavaOne started with the following invite, to the Tangosol and SolarMetric Founder’s Party.

I was expecting this to be just another JavaOne party, but while walking out of it at 2am I realized what a great bunch of conversations I’d had. Perhaps it was the fact that the hosts had paid for the party out of pocket that got people’s guards down and let the ideas flow. There was a high density of accomplished technologists, and the following picture sums the mood up nicely. On the left you can see Neelan Choksi, SolarMetric co-founder, SpringSource COO and one of the most interesting and capable software business people I’ve met. In the middle is Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of Atlassian, with whom I had a bunch of great conversations about creating deeper integration between Eclipse, Mylyn and Atlassian’s increasingly impressive product suite (thanks go to Nitin Bharti for the picture).

The Eclipse Party was awesome too. A ton of people turned out, the beer flowed freely and at the end of the night it was just me and a few Eclipse Foundation folks left, including Lynn Gayowski and Ian Skerrett.

The best conversation I had at the EclipseCon party was with Rod Johnson–not a surprise considering how interesting he is to talk to–but the topic of the conversation flipped from SpringSource tools to having him show me how he’s been using Tasktop to manage his work. I got some great feedback on the key usability corners that we’re planning to address for the Tasktop Summer release. And that concluded my JavaOne experience very nicely, which in summary was a chance to chat with some great people about building software tools and platforms, get some fresh perspectives, and figure out how we can work together to make our offerings better, cooler, and more useful for the next time the conference rolls around.

Life is about to start getting a lot easier for enterprise application developers. Last October, my JDJ article concluded with the following statement:

Eclipse plug-in developers are already spoiled with a dramatically easier way of building applications and are incapable of going back to a day in which the IDE support did not provide them with this high level of automation at both the language and component level. While the much more heterogeneous nature of JEE applications makes this kind of automation more challenging, the latest developments in the Eclipse WTP and Mylyn frameworks provide key enablers. It is high time that Java EE developers start feeling spoiled by their tool support as well.

Today’s announcement of the OSGi-based SpringSource Application Platform seals the deal. Consider the facts that Java is a great OO language, that OSGi is arguably the best component model to date and meshes perfectly with Java, and that Spring is the de facto programming model for reducing the complexity of enterprise applications. What’s clear from the announcement is that these three modularity technologies will work together seamlessly on the server side.

The final thought to keep in mind is just how far this combination of Spring, Eclipse and Mylyn can go. The static nature of Java and the quality of the OSGi component model have made it possible for Eclipse to provide a remarkable set of productivity features such as consistent refactoring across Java and plug-in resources and easy launching and debugging of plug-in based desktop applications. The Spring Framework is building on the very same Java and OSGi technologies…

The neat thing about good modularity is that it makes a tool builder’s life dramatically easier. Consider how Java’s type system enabled content assist and the browsing of type hierarchies. Or how the use of OSGi by Eclipse’s plug-ins allows you to stay sane while dealing with hundreds of plug-in versions and dependencies. Modularity technologies make it easy to navigate and browse the entire structure of the system, enabling Mylyn’s Task-Focused Interface to ensure that you only see the parts relevant to the task-at-hand, no matter how large that system is.

To date Eclipse developers have been spoiled by the PDE’s plug-in and feature editors, which make it easy to evolve large Eclipse-based applications. Today’s announcement means that the same component model will now be working on the server side. The IDE support is evolving alongside the Application Platform, and leverages WTP, Spring IDE and Mylyn. Here is a teaser of the Eclipse-based tools:

Tasktop Technologies has been having a great time working on these tools with SpringSource, and you can expect a lot more Eclipse-based innovation coming from both the commercial SpringSource Tool Suite and the open source SpringSource Application Platform Tools.