Tasktop

We had another fun and informative Eclipse Demo Camp this past Wednesday here in Vancouver with over 50 participants braving the elements to attend. A number of attendees were participating in MOvember. These gentlemen could be easily identified by the presence of a moustache adorning their face (myself included). A number of the speakers were fellow “mo bros” and their donation pages are linked below where you can rate their moustache and make a donation.

What is Eclipse Demo Camp? The Eclipse Foundation sponsors Demo Camp events world wide. The Eclipse Demo Camp is a gathering of local Eclipse enthusiasts, giving individuals the opportunity to present or hear about Eclipse based technology being developed locally.

Vancouver Demo Camp Format. The Vancouver Eclipse Demo Camp has taken the “learn by fire hose” approach: 7 or 8 fast paced 10 min talks delivered by local industry and academics building on Eclipse. This includes a minute to answer a quick question while in parallel the next speaker is plugging in and lining up to deliver their talk. Its fast, its fun, and translates into rapid exposure to really cool technologies in just over an hour. Attendees have commented that this high energy, to the point format offers a nice alternative to events with longer talks.

The Speakers

We enjoyed talks from the following speakers:

Mik Kersten, lead of the Eclipse Mylyn Project and CEO of Tasktop, gave a quick introduction to the Eclipse Ecosystem and why it excels as a platform for innovation.

 
Andrew Eisenberg from SpringSource/VMWare demonstrated Groovy tooling within Eclipse and how easily Grails controllers and model classes can be generated from within the Spring Source Tool Suite. Slides (pdf)

 
Jim DeLaHunt of Jim DeLaHunt & Associates demonstrated how Eclipse can be used to perform runtime debugging of large php applications, something many of us take for granted. He equated life before discovering Eclipse PHP debugging to working with ‘bear skins and stone knives’ to get the job done. Great analogy Jim, I can’t imagine how I’d survive without Eclipse’s debugger.

 
David Green, a committer on the Eclipse Mylyn project, explained the problem of keeping documentation up to date and showed how Mylyn’s WikiText module can be leveraged to build Eclipse documentation crowdsourced from user contributed wiki content (i.e. from EclipsePedia). See David’s blog.  Slides (pdf) Movember Donations

 
Emerson Murphy-Hill from the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia demonstrated a new way to communicate the presence of code smells through a visualizations called “stench blossoms”. These “blossoms” are drawn within the Eclipse editor along the right hand margin and scale in proportion to the severity of the smell. For more information, read the paper and download the tool.

 
Sam Davis from the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia, demonstrated a prototype within Eclipse that dynamically presents the abstractions in your source code more succinctly (so that it feels like you’re using a dynamic language while in fact you’re still using java). You have to see it to believe it. If you would like to try this technology sign up for his user study.

 
Ian Bull from EclipseSource demonstrated the simplicity of customizing and provisioning Eclipse using Yoxos. In addition to custom Eclipse configurations, Ian also pointed out that Yoxos can help developers that need to manage multiple different instances/profiles of Eclipse. Movember Donations

 
David Shepherd from Tasktop closed the speaking protion of the evening off with a few quick best practices when working with Tasktop Pro. David put the call out to all Mylyn and Tasktop users to ping him on his twitter account and share your workflow practices. Slides (pdf), Movember Donations

After the presentations we all enjoyed good food, drinks and conversation. I’m already looking forward to the next Demo Camp! This is the third year Tasktop has organized this Eclipse community event, and each year has been better than the last. Thanks go out to Andrew Eisenberg from the SpringSource crew for helping with this year’s Demo Camp. Also, thanks to whoever provided the runtime debugging of my (paper based) sign up sheet at the event, catching my miss use of the assignment operator:

P.S. My Movember page. Drop me a donation and a comment!

The recent upgrade of Eclipse.org’s Bugzilla to 3.4.1 has revealed a bug that can cause hundreds of false incomings in the Task List. Those users who are using Bugzilla 3.4.1 and have 1000+ tasks from that repository in their task list are likely affected by this bug.   A fix for this is now available in the most recent Mylyn weekly build. Update sites for weekly builds are available on the downloads page (under 3.3 Weekly Builds):

 http://eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/#weekly

If you have already been affected by this bug and see hundreds of false incomings in your Task List, after installing the latest Mylyn weekly build you will want to restore your last known good task list using the Task List view menu’s “Restore Tasks from History…” wizard.

Tasktop Pro users, an Early Access build that includes the fix will be available before noon pacific time (Sept 1).  Once available the build will be announced on the EA announcement task.

If you are experiencing any problems submitting changes to existing tasks, try updating your repository configuration and then try submitting again. To force an update of the repository configuration, open the Task Repositories view (Window > Show View > Other > Tasks > Task Repositories), right+click on the repository in question and in the resulting popup choose “Update Repository Configuration”.

The love of camping, for many, is rooted in the experiences we had as kids being dropped off in the great outdoors for a week of fun, food, and friendship. We’d learn how to create shelter from branches and fire without matches; survival skills we’d hopefully never have to rely on. All too soon the week was over and it was time to say goodbye to all the new friends. Good times.

Fast forward to November 25th, 2008, the 2nd Vancouver Eclipse Demo Camp. We had a bunch of similarly eager faces gathered around the warm glow of a projector waiting to see the latest in Eclipse-based Technology. It only lasted one evening but we all learned about cool stuff and met a bunch of great people over beers (no Marshmallows at this camp). I kicked things off with an overview of the Eclipse Ecosystem and its amazing growth to date, then we jumped right into demos.

David Green introduced us to WikiText, the slick new wiki syntax and rendering engine slated for Mylyn 3.1. Blog, Slides:

Jingwen Owen Ou then gave an excellent overview of his Google Summer of Code experience developing numerous features for Mylyn 3.1 including intelligent comment folding, find support in the task editor, and WikiText Mylyn integration. Slides:

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood demonstrated Tripoli which leverages code coverage tooling to quickly locate where behavior is implemented.

Guillaume Pothier of Pleiad Lab, University of Chile presented TOD, an amazing debugging tool that can travel back in time to when and where a variable was set! Slides:

Mandeep Jassal of BusinessObject/SAP Vancouver demonstrated Crystal Reports for Eclipse which enables report construction and execution all from within Eclipse. An Eclipse RCP based Crystal Reports viewer was also demonstrated. Slides:

Andrew Eisenberg of SpringSource gave us a glimpse of the work he has done to make JDT more extensible though application of load time weaving (using AJDT). Slides:

Mik Kersten of Tasktop Technologies discussed the Task-Focused Interface and how Tasktop is able to use the modularity of Eclipse to address different market segments. Slides:

Thanks to all who participated this year and to each of the presenters. To be notified of other Mylyn, Tasktop related news, consider signing up for the Tasktop newsletter.

I hope to see you all again at the next Vancouver Eclipse DemoCamp!

Posted by Robert Elves

I have just published an article with tips on how to get more out of Mylyn with the summer release of Tasktop. It starts with an overview of Mylyn, followed by an introduction to Tasktop for Eclipse. The article covers how Tasktop extends Mylyn’s task-focused interface beyond the Eclipse workbench to other aspects of the our workweek including email, time reporting and web browsing.

The article is available both on DZone and Tasktop.com. For questions or comments on the article feel free to use this post.

	Read and vote for the article on dzone
	Read the article on the new Tasktop Resources page