Tasktop Blog

At the Symbian Exchange & Expo conference, I presented a talk called Coordinating contributions: lessons learned growing an OSS community, sharing my lessons learned from the AspectJ and Eclipse Mylyn communities. The Symbian Foundation has adopted the EPL, Bugzilla, and an open development model. What makes the Mylyn project an interesting data point is that with the same infrastructure, it has seen over 800 bug and enhancement reports resolved by patches from a very active contributor community. That’s around 1/7 of our bugs resolved, and falls within the top two Eclipse projects for total contribution count. While Tasktop Technologies has provided the resources for maintaining, supporting and evolving the Mylyn frameworks, we have managed to create a very permeable and successful ecosystem for contributors.

The talk broke the contribution problem up into three pillars: the modular platform that defines the landscape of interesting contributions, the incentive structure needed to drive contributors, and the collaboration tools that support the open development process. While responding questions after the presentation, I was struck by how important the extension install story is to the first two pillars.

Open platforms need easy extension install

If you release a cool tool and nobody can find or install it, does it still make a sound? Not if the sound that you’re after is the roar of broad adoption. One ingredient of an install story is the dependency management technology, which defines the modularity of extensions. In Eclipse, this is a solved problem thanks to OSGi and the Equinox P2 provisioning system.

Another ingredient is incentive structure. The Eclipse Plug-in Central site provided a web portal for listing extensions, but was disconnected from an install story. In contrast, consider the success of the market-driven incentives of Apple’s app store. Or the seamless install process of iPhone apps and Firefox add-ons. Incredible ecosystem growth can result when install technology, modularity mechanisms, and incentive structure line up. While Eclipse provides a great generic install and dependency management mechanism, as the number of Mylyn integrations grew, we realized that a limiting factor of adoption was the discovery of integrations and ease of their installation. In order to continue to support our growth and not overly bias our ecosystem to those extensions that were hosted on Eclipse.org, we needed to streamline Eclipse’s install experience for Mylyn connectors. So we created the Mylyn Connector Discovery tool.

Generalizing Mylyn Connector Discovery

Since the release of Connector Discovery release with Eclipse Galileo, the listing has grown and received consistent praise from users and integrators. We’ve since seen many requests to generalize the mechanism to other install use cases ranging from Eclipse Pulsar SDK installs to the exciting new Eclipse Marketplace effort. The SpringSource Tool Suite is a great example of how the Discovery UI can be leveraged for targeted extension install.

In response to this interest, we have generalized the code and are proposing to move it to the the Equinox P2 project, home of Eclipse install. For details on that proposal see Eclipse bug 295273. What I hope we see in the Eclipse Helios release time frame is the Discovery mechanism as P2 API for special-purpose install workflows, with extensions for Mylyn Connectors, Eclipse Marketplace and more. This Discovery install story is additionally relevant to Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) install scenarios, which often need a simplified and tailored install experience.

While serving on the Eclipse board of directors, a concern I repeatedly raised was the repeated problems that arose from an incomplete install story. The great thing about being part of a meritocratic ecosystem like Eclipse, which rewards participation, is the ability to put code and resources where your mouth is.

The economics of extension listings

A tension that surfaces around shared resources is the Tragedy of the Commons. This gets discussed repeatedly in Eclipse, and can happen in vendor neutral open source ecosystems when organizations attempt to derive value from common frameworks and tools without contributing enough back. As a result, those ecosystems tend to be lead by organizations that understand commercial open source enough to act with enlightened self-interest. But with the continually growing number of Mylyn integrations, we also needed to consider companies with a shorter-term outlook. For example, like other projects, we see the pattern of vendors leveraging our frameworks in ways where they impose a significant support burden on the committers, and not contributing back in terms of patches or resources to help grow those frameworks. While I believe that an open source project like Mylyn should welcome all integrations, an indefinitely increasing support burden is not scalable and can reduce the time available for innovation. We need to avoid the Easter Island effect where everyone builds themselves self-serving heads without prioritizing the long-term health of the ecosystem within which they operate (see Easter Island/Collapse of the Ecosystem).

Discovery style extension listings provide a great opportunity to encourage meritocracy, one of the driving principles of a vendor-neutral development process like Eclipse’s, and help align the interests of a project with those leveraging on it. For good references on meritocracy see Chris Aniszczyk’s recent post. In preparation for last June’s release of the Mylyn Connector Discovery, we worked with our community to create listing criteria that achieve this balance. To paraphrase here, committers can vote you into the listing if you contribute enough to the project to offset the additional burden that you impose on the committers. If you are a vendor and are pulling your weight on the project by growing the frameworks and tools for all integrators to leverage, you can get your own section. If you have a community-oriented open source integration, committers go an extra mile and offer you UI and API reviews in order to help encourage cross-ecosystem collaborations, which can yield a long-term benefit, as evidenced by our collaborations with Mozilla. The listing criteria are open to feedback and input on Eclipse bug 279709.

To date, this meritocratic listing approach has worked extremely well for promoting high-quality extensions and contributions. It has encouraged the growth and adoption of independent efforts such as the Mantis connector, reduced the adoption bias we had of connectors that were hosted on Eclipse.org, and provided a mechanism for promoting the latest round of commercial integrations needed to grow the Mylyn user base.

With a generalized Discovery mechanism in place, I hope that we see a similar trend for other special-purpose Eclipse extensions. For example, the Eclipse Marketplace can use ranking in the Discovery listings for promoting members’ solutions. Projects like Eclipse Pulsar can make their key contributors’ mobile SDKs trivial to install. And the next round of innovative Eclipse projects can use this mechanism to help grow their ecosystem of extensions by promoting meritocracy.

I spent the early years of my career with MacOS and then Linux as my primary OS. When the focus of my work moved to tool building, I decided that I needed to use the OS that was most common in the tools’ target audience. In the Eclipse ecosystem, that’s Windows, which captures more than three quarters of Eclipse IDE downloads.

The great thing about Eclipse is that architecturally, thanks to the amazing SWT framework that IBM created, Eclipse provides a native experience on your OS of choice. But last April, when I moved my primary OS to the Windows 7 RC, I noticed two things. The first was a feeling reminiscent of when I first started using Windows XP early 2001. Windows 7 was slick, responsive, and brought the desktop client to a new level of refinement. The second observation was that Eclipse and Tasktop, which I spend the majority of my time in, looked like dated Windows XP applications.

Today we’re happy to announce that Tasktop is working with Microsoft to help make Eclipse look and feel like an exemplary Windows 7 application. It is great to see Microsoft supporting this effort, since it will impact a broad range of users of the Eclipse IDE, as well users of commercial Eclipse-based IDEs such as the SpringSource Tool Suite IDE, and Eclipse RCP applications such as Tasktop Pro for Windows. Read more about the Microsoft initiative behind this on Vijay Rajagopalan’s post on the Microsoft Interoperability blog.

The majority of Eclipse’s current Windows 7 interoperability comes from the previous efforts of the Eclipse SWT teams and from the backwards compatibility of Windows 7. So you can happily run Eclipse on Windows 7 today. This allows us to focus entirely on leveraging the new features in Windows 7 and on look-and-feel enhancements. Here are a couple of highlights of the initial scope of the effort. Note that all contributions will be made to Eclipse.org under the EPL.

Taskbar Progress (Eclipse bug 293228)

Windows 7 provides a new visual representation of progress on taskbar icons. This feature removes the need to Alt+Tab to an application just to check on the status of a long-running job, such as a download. The plan is to integrate this with Eclipse progress in order to allow some key jobs, such as a full builds and runtime launches, to indicate their status on the taskbar. We already have a working prototype of this functionality, which I’ll show later today when I arrive at Eclipse Summit Europe.

Taskbar Jump Lists (Eclipse bug 293229)

The redesigned Windows 7 taskbar allows applications to expose frequently used features or files. We plan to incorporate this with Eclipse commands and actions that will benefit from quick taskbar based access.

We have some additional enhancements planned, including updating the widget colors and styling to match the Windows 7 look. SWT walks a very careful line in terms of leveraging native widgets, following accessibility guidelines and using desktop themes. Enhancing that experience would not be possible without the technical expertise of the Microsoft Windows and Eclipse SWT teams, whom we have to thank for the high quality Eclipse on Windows experience that we have today. Thanks to this new open source collaboration, what we’ll soon have is the icing on that cake.

If you’re interested in tracking progress, or chiming in with what else you would like to see implemented to streamline the Eclipse experience on Windows 7, refer to Eclipse bug 293226 and its subtasks.

The landscape of change management tools is diverse, due to the presence of legacy systems, new tools for agile and Scrum, and the need to choose among best-of-breed solutions. Across the Mylyn and Tasktop channels we have seen over 1000 requests for Mylyn connectors to 60 different change and task management solutions. The 2009 Eclipse Survey demonstrated this heterogeneity, identifying the popularity of Mozilla Bugzilla and Atlassian JIRA, followed by Trac, Mantis, IBM Rational ClearQuest and others, all with active use in the Eclipse ecosystem. With today’s releases of Tasktop 1.5, Eclipse Galileo, Mylyn 3.2 and more connectors, the measurable productivity benefits of the task-focused interface are now available for all of the change management solutions popular with Eclipse users. Thanks to the rapid expansion of Mylyn and Tasktop integrations, Eclipse is now the most broadly connected IDE available. Here are some highlights from today’s releases.

Mylyn 3.2

The biggest news is the Mylyn Connector Discovery portal, which makes finding and installing connectors as easy as downloading iPhone apps or Firefox add-ins (screenshot follows). In addition to having resolved 334 Bugzilla reports and feature requests since the March release of Mylyn 3.1, and 988772 since the Eclipse Ganymede release of Mylyn 3.0, we have highlighted 23 notable features in the Mylyn New & Noteworthy. One of the most significant is the UI improvements that we’ve made to the Task Editor, the main point of contact to the task-focused workday. The process of triaging incoming change notifications and commenting on tasks should now be faster than going through email.

The most noteworthy community contribution to this release is the screen capture and editing improvements made by Hiroyuki Inaba. Hiroyuki took the basic screen capture facility, which itself originated entirely from community contributions, and turned it into a full-featured tool for communicating with screenshots. We are very pleased to see that even as the project matures, community contributions to Mylyn remain high. Since the Ganymede release, we have seen 249 Bugzilla reports on Mylyn resolved by countless patches.

The biggest addition to Mylyn in the past year is WikiText, the lightweight wiki markup editing framework, created by David Green, which we all now depend on when authoring tasks. WikiText has seen numerous improvements, such as integration with the local task editor, formatting for stack traces, and output to PDF when used as an API for converting wiki documents.

Tasktop 1.5

This release of Tasktop has seen the usual stream of improvements and responses to user feedback, and the free trial has been extended to 60 days. The most notable parts of the release are two new connectors to popular change management tools, which have been added to Tasktop.

ClearQuest Connector

The Mylyn integration for ClearQuest has long been in the top 10 highest voted feature requests among 280,000 Bugzilla reports on Eclipse. Thanks to Tasktop Technologies’ new partnership with IBM around the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) web service APIs for change management, the connector is now available, and has been validated as “Ready for IBM Rational Software”. Teams using ClearQuest can now take advantage of offline support and powerful new capabilities for working with ClearQuest artifacts directly from Eclipse along with the benefits of the task-focused workspace and one-click multitasking.

ScrumWorks Pro Connector

The task-focused interface has its roots in agile development and we’ve recently seen a sharp increase in demand for Mylyn from teams and organizations adopting Scrum. Tasktop has partnered with Danube, creators of ScrumWorks Pro, to deliver a fully integrated environment for Scrum development that takes advantage of Mylyn’s task-focused interface, enabling Task List integration, offline editing, and the task-focused workflow for users of ScrumWorks.

Connectors Galore

We created the Tasktop Certified program in order to provide users with assurance that the Mylyn connectors they are installing meet a quality level defined by the Eclipse UI guidelines, the Eclipse coordinated release guidelines, the Mylyn framework guidelines, and Tasktop’s usability guidelines. When you see the “Tasktop Certified” label you can be sure that no matter what makes up your tool stack, the connectors you install will interoperate seamlessly to provide you with comprehensive Eclipse integration, focus for workspace artifacts, and one-click multitasking. For example, if you’re making a Spring-powered application, tracking tasks with JIRA, building with Bamboo, and using Subversion for your source code, you simply install the latest Tasktop Certified SpringSource Tool Suite, check off the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse and the CollabNet Desktop in the Mylyn Connector Discovery to create a fully integrated and task-focused tool set. Here’s a glimpse of the connector ecosystem today.

		Mylyn 3.2 New & Noteworthy
		Tasktop 1.5 New & Noteworthy

The goal of the Eclipse Mylyn project and its ecosystem of connectors is to make the productivity benefits of the task-focused interface available to everyone. Mylyn enables a broad range of change management and collaboration technologies to be integrated with Eclipse. The result is a task-based inbox with a consistent rich client experience for managing all your projects and tasks in one place. Today Mylyn supports issue trackers, version control, email protocols, code review tools, build systems, wikis and more. In the future, we can expect the reach of Mylyn connectors to extend to additional domains like social networking as well as new collaboration protocols such as Google Wave.

Across the Mylyn and Tasktop channels we have seen over a thousand votes for sixty different change management and collaboration tools. Three dozen Mylyn connectors are now available, from a wide variety of vendors. But the mere availability of connectors is not enough. The success of Firefox’s add-ins and Apple’s App Store are great examples of how important ease of installation is to broad adoption. Having fielded countless installation support requests and hearing from numerous users unaware of available connectors, we realized that the process of finding and installing connectors was a limiting factor in the adoption of Mylyn. We looked to the Web Tools Platform for leadership in linking a similar sort of installable extension, its Server Adapters. At EclipseCon we announced our plans to leverage the same mechanisms for Mylyn and sought input from our integrator community in order to incorporate their needs (bug 272621) and established a selection process for listing connectors. The screenshot below shows the result.

Mylyn connectors can now be installed with a few clicks, for both Eclipse.org based ones as well as those from other portals, such as the Tasktop Certified portion of the commercial ecosystem and other parts of the open source community. Note that the listing in the screenshot is a draft and subject to change.

Leveraging P2

In attempting to reduce our support overhead for connector install, we realized that the Eclipse P2 update mechanism was both the cause of and solution to all of our problems. P2 provides a very nice framework for validating and automating installs, and has seen some major improvements in Eclipse 3.5, so we built the Mylyn Connector Discovery entirely on P2. With our usual less is more design philosophy, an additional constraint we imposed is that beyond accepting a license agreement, the interaction should only require the user to view a single discovery page. To avoid the need for sophisticated error messages, we also eagerly validate update sites and disable install for those that are not available. For more advanced configurations options the user can always drop back into the P2 UI.

Building on PDE

Since we’re all spoiled by the quality of Eclipse’s tools for working with plug-ins, we wanted a similar experience for authoring connector discovery listings. We also wanted a convenient way of testing and debugging the listings. To support that, we used the plug-in extension mechanism in an interesting way. Each discovery entry is a bundle, with its contents defined via extension point. The discovery UI downloads and reads all the discovery extensions listed on the eclipse.org/mylyn/discovery/directory.xml listing, in addition to those contributed by running bundles. We’ve been very pleased with the resulting ease of authoring, testing and deploying the bundles. Here’s an example of the extension point in use.

<extension
    point=“org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.core.connectorDiscovery”>
  <connectorDescriptor
    categoryId=“org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.site.categories.connector
      CategoryEclipseOrg”
    id=“org.eclipse.mylyn.bugzilla_feature”
    license=“EPL”
    name=“Mozilla Bugzilla”
    provider=“Eclipse Mylyn”
    siteUrl=“http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/weekly/e3.4″
    …>
    <icon
      image32=“images/bugzilla32.png”
      image64=“images/bugzilla48.png”>
    </icon>
    <overview
      screenshot=“images/bugzilla-screenshot-320×240.png”
      summary=“%connectorDescriptor.overview.summary.bugzilla”
      url=“http://eclipse.org/mylyn/”>
    </overview>
  </connectorDescriptor>
</extension>

We have high hopes for the discovery technology bringing the benefits of Mylyn and Eclipse to even more users. The next time that you’re curious about whether your change management solution is integrated with Eclipse, you’ll only be a couple clicks away from finding that out and having it installed. Stay tuned for more news of what’s coming in Mylyn 3.2.

I just left the Rational Software Conference (RSC) 2009 and arrived at JavaOne. I joined Steve Speicher at RSC to present the results of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative, in which we contributed to the 1.0 specification of a REST-based API for change management. We’ll post more on Tasktop’s participation in OSLC soon.

Our involvement in OSLC started with the tremendous amount of interest in a Mylyn connector for IBM Rational’s ClearQuest. The corresponding bug has been in the top 10 most voted enhancement requests on Eclipse for a couple of years, and is now ranked 4th. We decided with IBM that the best way to approach this was to collaborate on the OSLC initiative, which is now providing a generic way to access tasks in repositories that provide an OSLC web service API. We are leveraging OSLC API to build the soon-to-be-released ClearQuest connector.

If you’re interested in learning more about how OSLC will impact Tasktop and Mylyn users, check out the developerWorks podcast with myself, Carl Zetie and Steve Abrams.

IBM developerWorks: Abrams, Zetie, and Kersten on first fruits from the OSLC Also available in MP3 format

	Now it’s time for the craziness that is JavaOne. I just had a quick chat with Michael Ernst who is presenting some very interesting work on Preventing Bugs with Pluggable Type Checking which I was very glad to hear is coming in Java 7. After that it will be good to hear from Rod Johnson on the Spring Framework 3.0: New and Notable.

My talk on what’s new in Mylyn and the task-focused interface will be on Thursday:

	Mylyn: Redefining the “I” of the IDE Thursday, June 4, 2009 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM Hall E 133

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…