Less is More

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.

Coté has posted an interview with me and Ian Skerrett on RedMonk Radio 

We discuss how the Eclipse ecosystem is driven by vendor-neutral open source frameworks such as Mylyn, and the ways in which commercial products like Tasktop build on that. Some interesting points that came up are: the various ways in which vendors decide on what to open, the split between open and closed source Mylyn connectors, the role of the community, and the benefits of Eclipse’s governance model. We wrap up the conversation with some thoughts on OSGi and its use in runtimes such as the SpringSource Application Platform.

And yes, Coté is now sporting a cool sticker on his infamous laptop, which admittedly does not take a less is more approach to stickers.

There’s a light at the end of the 3.0 tunnel that Mylyn committers have been in—the light is a fast approaching train called Ganymede.

Here’s a status update for both early adopters and integrators. Since last June’s Mylyn 2.0 and Europa release we’ve had three releases, and the ecosystem around Mylyn has evolved from a handful of connectors to nearly two dozen. Since the Mylyn 2.3 release we have been focused on incorporating integrators’ feedback in order to produce the revised Mylyn 3.0 APIs. Below is a summery of the Mylyn 3.0 endgame for interested early adopters and API integrators.

Early Adopters

Once Ganymede RC1 is released next week you can start experimenting with Mylyn 3.0. However, note that your connector may not be ported, and as such we do not recommend updating your Eclipse until you know that the connector you are using has been ported. Once Mylyn 3.0 RC3 is released on June 4th we would like as many early adopters to move to it as possible, and will post the list of available connectors at that time.

Integrators

Mylyn 3.0 will support both Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4, and as such will replace Mylyn 2.x. The Mylyn 3.0 APIs are much simpler, encapsulate considerably more common behavior in the framework and expose much less internals (in part thanks to the great API tools in Eclipse 3.4). This means that extensions will be more robust and easier to implement and maintain.

We will be working on the Javadocs and Porting Guide next week, so for projects outside of Eclipse.org, RC2 or RC3 is a good time to start porting. The release schedule has had no significant changes since July. We will continue incorporating integrator feedback, and the best place to track progress and make general comments is bug 227660.

Tasks API

The JIRA connector has been ported, and Bugzilla will be ported by next week. Due to the extent of the changes with org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.core, and the benefit of having connectors ported as soon as possible, we will be offering additional porting assistance. If you’re interested in closer assistance, let us know via bug 227660.

Context API

The changes in the Context API are straightforward, and you may be able to do most of the bridge porting by organizing imports, then looking to the Java bridge, and referring to the porting guide if needed. We will update the porting guide with the answer to any question that comes up, so please don’t hesitate to ask as it will help others. The bulk of the changes here had to do with simplifying the API and hiding internals.

Team API

The changes are minor and porting should be straightforward. The bulk of the changes had to do with ensuring that Team extensions could be redistributed without requiring Team/CVS or the Eclipse SDK.

Happy hacking!

For those that haven’t had a chance to attend the madness that is JavaOne, I think the following picture sums it up. There is a massive amount of people waiting in massive lines to attend massive talks. I snapped this shot while walking into my Mylyn: code at the speed of thought talk. The people at the front of the line had been standing there for way too long and looked very bored. The talk had filled up at pre-registration and had around 700 attendees. But once it was underway, the crowd and questions were great. For those interested in seeing this talk, I plan on recording it and making a webcast available this summer.

For me the conference started with the RedMonk Community One day, which was ridiculously located in a huge hall, in the middle of a never ending lunch line. Amazingly the RedMonk guys managed to get a lively crowd engaged in an RIA discussion, despite the fact that you needed a microphone to speak to anyone more than three feet away from you.

With a lack of interesting announcements from major vendors the news that dominated for me was the excitement around the SpringSource Application Platform. The SpringSource booth appeared to have a permanent queue of people attached to it and the interest in OSGi was palpable. Here’s a picture of a rare quiet moment before the exhibit hall opened. On the left is Christian Dupuis, who we’re working with in Vancouver on the tool support. Alongside him are Rob Harrop and Adrian Colyer, the very entertaining SpringSource gurus who had more demo laptops than hands.

My favorite event at JavaOne started with the following invite, to the Tangosol and SolarMetric Founder’s Party.

I was expecting this to be just another JavaOne party, but while walking out of it at 2am I realized what a great bunch of conversations I’d had. Perhaps it was the fact that the hosts had paid for the party out of pocket that got people’s guards down and let the ideas flow. There was a high density of accomplished technologists, and the following picture sums the mood up nicely. On the left you can see Neelan Choksi, SolarMetric co-founder, SpringSource COO and one of the most interesting and capable software business people I’ve met. In the middle is Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of Atlassian, with whom I had a bunch of great conversations about creating deeper integration between Eclipse, Mylyn and Atlassian’s increasingly impressive product suite (thanks go to Nitin Bharti for the picture).

The Eclipse Party was awesome too. A ton of people turned out, the beer flowed freely and at the end of the night it was just me and a few Eclipse Foundation folks left, including Lynn Gayowski and Ian Skerrett.

The best conversation I had at the EclipseCon party was with Rod Johnson–not a surprise considering how interesting he is to talk to–but the topic of the conversation flipped from SpringSource tools to having him show me how he’s been using Tasktop to manage his work. I got some great feedback on the key usability corners that we’re planning to address for the Tasktop Summer release. And that concluded my JavaOne experience very nicely, which in summary was a chance to chat with some great people about building software tools and platforms, get some fresh perspectives, and figure out how we can work together to make our offerings better, cooler, and more useful for the next time the conference rolls around.

Life is about to start getting a lot easier for enterprise application developers. Last October, my JDJ article concluded with the following statement:

Eclipse plug-in developers are already spoiled with a dramatically easier way of building applications and are incapable of going back to a day in which the IDE support did not provide them with this high level of automation at both the language and component level. While the much more heterogeneous nature of JEE applications makes this kind of automation more challenging, the latest developments in the Eclipse WTP and Mylyn frameworks provide key enablers. It is high time that Java EE developers start feeling spoiled by their tool support as well.

Today’s announcement of the OSGi-based SpringSource Application Platform seals the deal. Consider the facts that Java is a great OO language, that OSGi is arguably the best component model to date and meshes perfectly with Java, and that Spring is the de facto programming model for reducing the complexity of enterprise applications. What’s clear from the announcement is that these three modularity technologies will work together seamlessly on the server side.

The final thought to keep in mind is just how far this combination of Spring, Eclipse and Mylyn can go. The static nature of Java and the quality of the OSGi component model have made it possible for Eclipse to provide a remarkable set of productivity features such as consistent refactoring across Java and plug-in resources and easy launching and debugging of plug-in based desktop applications. The Spring Framework is building on the very same Java and OSGi technologies…

The neat thing about good modularity is that it makes a tool builder’s life dramatically easier. Consider how Java’s type system enabled content assist and the browsing of type hierarchies. Or how the use of OSGi by Eclipse’s plug-ins allows you to stay sane while dealing with hundreds of plug-in versions and dependencies. Modularity technologies make it easy to navigate and browse the entire structure of the system, enabling Mylyn’s Task-Focused Interface to ensure that you only see the parts relevant to the task-at-hand, no matter how large that system is.

To date Eclipse developers have been spoiled by the PDE’s plug-in and feature editors, which make it easy to evolve large Eclipse-based applications. Today’s announcement means that the same component model will now be working on the server side. The IDE support is evolving alongside the Application Platform, and leverages WTP, Spring IDE and Mylyn. Here is a teaser of the Eclipse-based tools:

Tasktop Technologies has been having a great time working on these tools with SpringSource, and you can expect a lot more Eclipse-based innovation coming from both the commercial SpringSource Tool Suite and the open source SpringSource Application Platform Tools.

I recently read Cote’s blog entry on the RedMonk CommunityOne day, where he mentioned Nitobi and Tasktop in the same sentence. At the end of this entry I’ll point out how amusingly small this made the world feel to me. That feeling inspired me to make a quick trace back through the thread of conferences and people that got me to where I’m sitting right now, at the JAX/EFE conference in Germany.

I attended my first conference in 1998 while an undergrad. It was OOPSLA, chaired by Bjorn Freeman-Benson. I got hooked by participating in the Design Fest and learned a lot from its lead, Peter Kriens. Then I went to Gregor Kiczales’ AOP tutorial, was blown away by what modularity technology could do with good tool support, and a year later found myself at PARC working on AspectJ tools. I returned to OOPSLA a year later for a nervous first talk about a web app that I implemented with AspectJ, which got me into some interesting discussions with Bjorn. At the following OOPSLA Gregor and I met Brian Barry of OTI, who told us about a yet unreleased IDE called Eclipse. Adrian Colyer and I got to working together on the AspectJ tool support for that Eclipse thing, with the AOSD conference as our regular meeting place. At last year’s AOSD Adrian and I laid out the plans for the SpringSource Tool Suite, and at the following JAX conference Rod Johnson and I explored the potential of a SpringSource and Tasktop partnership. A decade has passed since that first OOPSLA. Just today I chatted with Peter Kriens who is doing some fantastic OSGi work (that’s finally influencing Sun), Rod gave a great keynote at JAX and we celebrated our partnership with beers afterwards, and Bjorn is still running my favorite conference (now EclipseCon). Here’s a photo from EclipseCon 2008 with Cory Doctorow, Mike Milinkovich, me and Bjorn (courtesy of Ralph Mueller).

If you’re in Wiesbaden this week, I’m presenting two talks at JAX / Eclipse Forum Europe. JAX is a great conference with a couple thousand attendees, but I can’t call it my favorite until I learn a lot more German. Given the Mylyn and Tasktop adoption in Germany, I should probably start taking night courses.

Mylyn: code at the speed of thought, Apr. 24, 10:00am Towards the task-focused workday, Apr. 24, 1:45pm

The next conference on the Tasktop calendar is JavaOne. It’s great to get a chance to speak there because I haven’t set foot on a JavaOne stage since I did the demo portions of Gregor’s AspectJ talk in 2000. This will be a nice opportunity to position Mylyn’s Eclipse-based frameworks and the Task-Focused Interface in a broader context.

Mylyn: code at the speed of thought, May 8, 10:50am

I did drop in on JavaOne last year, and the best part was meeting Cote and doing a couple of interviews with him, so I’m really looking forward to the RedMonk Community One day at JavaOne. Which brings me to my amusement about Cote mentioning both Tasktop and Nitobi in his post. The world started feeling even smaller because I read that post last Friday, moments before I headed up to Whistler to ski with Andre Charland, the Nitobi CEO, whom I know from the ski hill and not from the conference circuit. Here’s a picture of Andre above the Blackcomb Glacier on that day:

Small world. I’ve grown so accustomed to conferences bringing like-minded technology people together that I didn’t realize skiing could do so too. Hopefully this means that I don’t need to learn how to play golf.

At EclipseCon, while showing the following screenshot, I was struck by the amount of open source collaboration and commercial innovation behind the bits on the screen. You’re looking at the recently launched SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) beta that SpringSource and Tasktop Technologies have been building.

The screenshot showcases several open source projects interoperating via common structure models and extensible UIs.

1) Spring IDE builds on the Eclipse Common Navigator in order to provide structure navigation for Spring Framework artifacts. Thanks to the extensibility of Eclipse JDT, Spring beans can be browsed as easily as Java classes. Eclipse Mylyn has been extended by Spring IDE in order to make the Spring artifacts focus on the active task. So even when building a very large enterprise application, you see only what you’re working on and can multitask with ease.

2) The crosscutting structure exposed by Spring AOP is provided by the pointcut parsing facilities from the Eclipse AspectJ project. The UI for navigating this is provided by a Spring IDE extension to the Eclipse AJDT project. The result is that the aspect-oriented artifacts in the application are as as easy to navigate as the object-oriented ones.

3) The Eclipse WTP XML editor has been extended to provide content assist, navigation and refactoring support for Spring artifacts. This is another place where Spring IDE leverages Mylyn in order to automatically fold away uninteresting XML, bringing that same benefit of focus to the editor.

Another thing that’s interesting is how the closed source tool support has been layered over top of the open source in order to incorporate expertise into the tool.

4) A key goal of the SpringSource Tool Suite is to provide a Consultant in a box experience by capturing the know-how of the SpringSource consultants. If you look at the Eclipse IDE’s Problems view you’ll see that it incorporates best practice suggestions on using the Spring Framework. Runtime error assistance has also been integrated with the IDE’s Console view.

5) If you look to the right of the screenshot, you’ll see a tutorial which interactively focuses you on the code relevant to each step. This leverages both the Eclipse User Assistance Cheat Sheet mechanism and Mylyn for the tutorial code’s capture and presentation. The task-focused tutorials are a novel application of Mylyn that drives the entire Eclipse UI as you learn, automatically doing things like creating projects, loading contexts and starting servers as needed.

A new season is around the corner and with it comes the latest seasonal release of Tasktop. Our splash screen continues to show British Columbia scenery, with cherry blossoms that signal the coming of Spring in Vancouver.

The most exciting thing about this release is that we were able to respond to all of the community interest for additional email integration. Tasktop now supports Google’s Gmail as well as generic IMAP. So if you’re a Gmail user, you’re in for a treat. The Gmail connector let’s you tag an email with your label of choice (I use “Tasks”), causing the corresponding message thread to automatically show up in your Task List. You can use this in conjunction with Gmail’s automatic labeling. For example, I have all email prefixed with “task: ” automatically labeled, which means that I can create tasks by sending myself email. I also have Google News Alerts automatically labeled, which means that instead of inbox clutter I have a task corresponding to each alert subject and with a click can open the corresponding thread. You also get all the other benefits that you expect from Tasktop for working with Gmail, such as offline access for the email tasks you collaborate on. Yes, you read right, Tasktop now gives you offline access to Gmail.

Since one of the most dramatic benefits of Tasktop is focused web browsing, we have had several requests to provide support for browser add-ins from those switching their default web browser to Tasktop. Some add-ins still make sense to use in the external browser, for example, if you want to inspect a page with the Web Developer Firefox add-in, you can easily do so by using the Open in External Browser action in the Tasktop browser’s Send to menu button. But the browser extension that we’ve had the most request for is del.icio.us bookmarks. We have created an early access program for early adopters to download the same weekly releases that developers at Tasktop use. The current weekly release of Tasktop includes a first cut at support for del.icio.us bookmarks. Also check out new features such as the Notes view and the Community feedback page. Enjoy!