Tasktop

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In spite of travel cuts, EclipseCon has been as lively and fun as ever. We had several presentations of Mylyn on Monday, the highlight being Rob and Steffen’s tutorial. The Eclipse awards were entertaining as usual. Bjorn-Freeman Benson roped me into doing a PowerPoint Karaoke session with Oisin Hurley. We had to give a short talk, to someone else’s slides, which Bjorn had selected and we had not seen before. We got a Higgins slide deck and contrived an elaborate pitch of how Higgins was the platform for Identity Theft 2.0. There were a lot of laughs.

Still ahead is my Mylyn: Redefining the “I” of the IDE talk in the keynote ballroom at 1:30pm today. I’ve got some new slides on our approach to integrating web services with Eclipse via both SWT/Browser bridging and a WS/REST layer for Eclipse. While embedding the IDE in the browser has been a hot topic with RAP, e4, and Bespin buzz, the hybrid approach we take also has some very neat properties and applications that I’ll show. Immediately after my talk Steve Northover and Boris Bokowski will show off some of the SWT technologies that make this approach possible. The nice thing is that in the upcoming Eclipse 3.5 release some of the very tricky stuff we’ve had to do in Tasktop’s browser, like invoking JavaScript form Java and vice versa, will now be available in the platform.

At 10:10 am on Thursday I’ll be on the Architecture Council Panel. A big highlight of Thursday is going to be the 50 minutes towards a better you session where David Green will present WikiText and Steffen Pingel will give what’s probably the first presentation dedicated to building Mylyn connectors. After that I’ll be on the Future of Open Source and Business panel at the co-located Open Source Executive Strategy Summit. The other panelists are leaders at Oracle, Cisco, the Bank of America and Microsoft, so I’m looking forward to representing the point of view of startups in the Eclipse ecosystem. One of the great things about Eclipse is the fact that small companies can play a big role in helping shape the technology that we all use.

Now back to smoothing the slides and demos for the 1:30pm talk…

Last fall Atlassian and Tasktop joined forces in order to provide users of Atlassian’s very popular developer tools with first-rate Eclipse and Mylyn integration. That effort reached its first public milestone today, with Atlassian’s beta release of the Crucible and Bamboo connectors for code review and continuous integration.

Our relationship with Atlassian started a couple of years ago with a tremendous amount of Mylyn community demand for a JIRA connector. Atlassian’s developer tool suite has grown considerably since that time. Confluence has become a popular wiki, and last week’s Mylyn 3.1-based release of the JIRA connector now supports Confluence markup for editing issues inside Eclipse. Crucible is a newer tool that has made it possible to work with code reviews as easily as it is to work with tasks and issues. With today’s release, all of Crucible’s facilities are hooked seamlessly into the Eclipse IDE. Reviews can be managed in Mylyn’s Task List and scheduled with a click.

Commenting on reviews is as easy as commenting on issues, and can be done right from the Java editor. Changes under review can be inspected in a diff view. And as expected from a Mylyn integration, the task-focused interface works for reviews, meaning that you only see the code relevant to the review in the Package Explorer and Java editor. We’ve been using this for all of our code reviews at Tasktop and as expected, the integration between Crucible’s collaborative facilities and Eclipse’s code navigation is a killer feature that we’re very happy to get into the hands of Mylyn and Tasktop users. It’s great to see this new application of the task-focused interface action, two new Tasktop Certified connectors, and the Mylyn API changes that Crucible and Bamboo are pushing will open up doors for other interesting tools.

The Bamboo integration speaks for itself. Setting up a Bamboo server is as easy as connecting Mylyn to JIRA, at which point builds can be managed within the IDE, and Mylyn’s desktop notifications make you aware of build status changes. My favorite feature is the ability to populate Eclipse’s JUnit view with failed tests in order to rerun them. You can then right-click a test to create a JIRA issue from the failure and have that instantly show up in your Task List, all in just a few clicks.

For those at EclipseCon, check out the tools in action at tonight’s BOF and the other Mylyn sessions. For more information check out the Atlassian blog post, New & Noteworthy and for those of you already using Crucible and Bamboo, enjoy!

Today’s Tasktop 1.4 and Eclipse Mylyn 3.1 releases are a milestone in the evolution of the task-focused interface. Mylyn continues to improve as a framework and core tools for open source developers, while Tasktop evolves its commercial integrations and enterprise-ready feature set. Together, these tools are bringing the benefits of the task-focused interface to a rapidly growing audience.

Mylyn 3.1 includes 432 bug fixes and enhancements, and 134 community contributions. This represents our highest rate of patches applied to date. One highlight is that the Mylyn Bugzilla Connector can finally edit all bug attributes, such as custom flags, so there’s no more need for users of customized Bugzilla installs to fall back to the browser.

This release also includes WikiText, a new addition to the Mylyn framework. Mylyn provides a broad set of Eclipse-based tools for working offline with web-based artifacts such as tasks and bugs. Wiki markup is a simple and powerful way of editing the text that’s presented by these applications. For example, many projects use wiki syntax when interacting on tasks and authoring documentation. As of Mylyn 3.1, wiki markup becomes a first class citizen of Eclipse. If you’re editing a JIRA issue with Confluence markup, you can do so directly from Mylyn’s task editor. If you’re authoring online help in a “.textile” file, you will immediately see the effects of your formatting without needing to preview changes in a web browser. In other words, the power of Eclipse’s code editing facilities are now available for your wiki editing.

All of these features, and many more, are also available in Tasktop Pro 1.4, the enterprise ready and fully supported product based on Mylyn. The biggest new feature in Tasktop 1.4 is the time synchronization. This has been one of the most requested features from our user community. It has taken us this long to deliver it because time tracking automation is a very tricky thing to get right. For example, if the automation is done without the user’s consent, it can have a big brother effect, which defeats our goal of empowering developers. So as usual, we have put all the control in the developer’s hands. Next to some nice BIRT-based reports you now have the ability to adjust all your timings before synchronizing them with the task repository, ensuring that all your activity is always accounted for. Tasktop will automatically track time that you spend working both inside and outside of Eclipse, present you with a chart of your activity, and allow you to edit that activity as needed. This is a huge time saver for those of us who need to fill out time sheets. For example, I recently learned that I needed to re-create six months of time sheets for R&D tax credit purposes. It took me only one hour to create and submit those reports.

There are many other new features in Tasktop 1.4, including support for Microsoft Exchange and the ability to create tasks from email threads. But my favorite is the streamlining that we have done for focused web browsing. For those who browse with Tasktop, bookmarks become a legacy technology. With this release, we have simplified the way that browsing activity populates your task context. Just activate a task, start browsing, and you will see a more concise context that represents your interaction with both web pages and web applications. This makes Tasktop’s one-click browsing session restore even more useful.

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements of task-focused tools coming from our partners, including the impending release of the premier IDE for users of the Spring Framework, the SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0, and some very neat developer tools that we have been working on with Atlassian. In the meantime, check out the New & Noteworthy for Tasktop and be more productive today.

		Mylyn 3.1 New & Noteworthy
		Tasktop 1.4 New & Noteworthy