Friday, 22 December 2006

Eclipse Mylar 1.0 Released

Today’s IDEs overload developers with information by presenting too many details of a system’s complexity. As a result, developers often waste an inordinate amount of time searching and browsing through hundreds of files to find the information relevant to the task-at-hand.

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the release of Eclipse Mylar 1.0. Mylar is a tasked-focused user interface that enhances developer productivity by reducing information overload and enabling easy multi-tasking.

Mylar provides a new task-focused user interface that filters Eclipse IDE views to show only the elements relevant to a specific task. Thereby focusing the attention of the developer and reducing the amount of scrolling and searching required to fix a bug or add a new feature.

"The key intuition behind Mylar is that when a developer fixes a bug or adds a feature, they only care about a subset of the system," says Mik Kersten, Mylar project leader. "Mylar’s innovation is to make this subset explicit by automatically managing task context on the developers’ behalf.

The end result is that the developers are able to focus on their programming instead of being forced to constantly find and re-find the information they need to get work done."

Mylar simplifies the task management complexity of a developer’s daily work. It enables multi-tasking by providing a task management view that allows developers to easily switch between tasks and share task context with other developers. Mylar also unifies the different task lists a developer typically uses, such as bug tracking and e-mail systems, by integrating these systems into a common Mylar Task List. This unified task list leverages Eclipse’s rich client capabilities to allow offline access and change notifications, enabling developers to spend more of their day in the Eclipse IDE where they are productive instead being forced to constantly switch back and forth between the browser and email inbox.

As per the announcement, Mylar already integrates with issue tracking software such as Bugzilla, JIRA and Trac. Organisations are also beginning to integrate or plan to integrate support for Mylar into their products, including CodeGear, Collabnet and Maven.