Tasktop

The Mylyn team is very pleased to announce today’s release of Mylyn 3.0 along with the Eclipse Ganymede release train. This occasion marks a big step in the evolution of the task-focused interface:

But the most amazing thing happening with Mylyn right now is the growing ecosystem of integrations. It’s great to see new language support, such as support for C/C++ via CDT’s Mylyn extensions. The Mylyn 2.0 release brought the task-focused interface to the very high usability bar set by the Eclipse Platform, and provided a first cut at APIs that enabled third parties to author connectors. The Mylyn 3.0 release brings us to the very high API quality bar set by the Eclipse Platform, by insulating integrators from framework internals, and providing APIs that will be binary compatible for the foreseeable future. We are still in the process of improving API documentation and tutorials, and the framework will continue to evolve as we consume the next round of integrator feedback. But Mylyn connectors will now be significantly more robust and easier to implement.

This is just the start of the Mylyn 3.0 release wave, as numerous integrations are in the process of porting to Mylyn 3.0. The reference implementations and connectors available from the Eclipse.org project are already ported (Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA, XPlanner, Web Templates, DLTK and Subversive), so if you use any of these you can update today. The following open source projects already have early access builds for Mylyn 3.0 available. Watch the Mylyn Extensions page for updates to the others.

Commercial products built on Mylyn are also in the process of being updated:

Enjoy the latest and greatest Mylyn release and stay tuned to this blog for an upcoming webcast on Mylyn 3.0. For now check out the New & Noteworthy, or if you’re an newcomer to task-focus programming, see the Mylyn 2.2 webcast.

David Carver has blogged some useful experiences about porting from Mylyn 2.0 to 3.0. Mylyn 3.0 contains very significant API changes that make Mylyn connectors more robust and easier to create. This release represents a critical evolution in the maturity of the Mylyn project. The Europa release cycle brought us a very wide diversity of new connectors with various requirements, which we have used to revamp the APIs. The cost of this change is that existing connectors will need to be ported to support Mylyn 3.0.

The diversity of Mylyn integrations now ranges from over a dozen open source projects, to commercial products like the SpringSource Tool Suite, JBuilder and Tasktop. In planning Mylyn 3.0, we had to decide whether to do a full year of milestone releases and make API changes throughout the year, or whether to release quarterly and batch the API changes to the last quarter. In our planning phase last July, several integrators identified that they wanted to consume Mylyn improvements throughout the year, to continue to have Mylyn insulate them from needing to have separate Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4 streams, and to only need to port once at the end of the release cycle.

While we managed to pull off off the changes, it was a tremendously hard task for the team to incorporate all the input and provide the revised APIs within a single quarter. As a result, even some of our own connectors did not get ported until late in the cycle. Given Mylyn’s rapid evolution, we still think that this was the best plan to transition for 2.0 to 3.0 while ensuring that the framework supports the next round of innovations. This rapid transition puts more burden on the current integrator community than we would like. To make migration as smooth as possible we’ve offered very close support to anyone interested. We will also publish additional connector documentation so please stay posted and consider watching the Porting Guide.

While any framework changes of this magnitude bring growing pains, the great news is that all of the connectors that are part of the Mylyn project (Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA, XPlanner and Web Templates) no longer make use of Mylyn internals, with some very minor exceptions that we’ll remove early in the 3.1. The Rally and CollabNet connectors are on track for release in mid or late July, as is Mantis. If you are a connector developer, please consider posting the availability of your connector, and any questions that you may have, on bug 237673: track Mylyn Extensions. This will help us set users’ expectations about when their connector will support Mylyn 3.0 and Ganymede.

We will start Mylyn 3.1 planning soon, and would like to hear input from integrators about their requirements for this next release cycle. Our current thinking is that we will do two releases in the year instead of four, with Mylyn 3.1 in December and 3.2 in June. Thanks to all of the API revisions that went into Mylyn 3.0, we are planning to make those releases binary compatible with 3.0, meaning that porting will not be required. If you have input or needs from our release cycle, please consider commenting on bug 236940: create Mylyn 3.1 release plan.