The newest feature of Europa that I didn’t really have a handle on was Mylyn; (previously Mylar), which is advertised as a task-based management system. And man, I wish I knew about this earlier. It is, as they say, a “game-changer”.

As one’s workspace grows in Eclipse, one tends to lose track of which files in which projects are important for the task at hand. Mylyn resolves this for you, and does so in a somewhat counter-intuitive way: it turns off the Navigator.

Well, without the Navigator, how to you find the files you are working with? You have to bootstrap yourself with one file that you open before turning on Mylyn’s “focus filter”. Mylyn then turns off the Navigator, and you bounce around your workspace by using Ctrl-click and Ctrl-T, and all the navigating goodies that Eclipse provides. And as you navigate to these files, Mylyn starts to show them in the Navigator view. So you only see the files that you are working with. You are focused on the task at hand. As Mylyn puts it, you are in a “Task focused UI” as opposed to “File focused” or “package focused” or whatever.

And the way Mylyn is implemented is so cleverly simple. It doesn’t try to do anything like analyzing code or grouping or any “advanced” techniques. It just records what files get opened as you move around Eclipse, building up its list of files that you think are important for the task. The list of files is stored as a context that can be reused when you return to a task, allowing you to focus on that task immediately, limiting “startup time” on a task.

Finally, how do you create tasks? Well, you can just add them in by hand in the Task View, or Mylyn allows you to query standard task and issue tools such as Bugzilla, Jira and Trac.

This developerWorks post by Mylyn Project Lead Mik Kersten details more of the benefits of Mylyn.

Other features

  • contexts become “change sets” in the Team synchronize view
  • you can upload contexts to Jira or Bugzilla or Trac so that others who work on your cases can see what files you changed
  • For those using Jira (and possibly others), a comment in the code that is a Jira key (e.g. “FLS-187″) can be CTRL-clicked on to open that issue
  • Mylyn can show tasks in a timeline view to help prioritize tasks
  • It can track the time you’ve worked on a task

I haven’t utilized Mylyn to its full extent. But even the small parts I’ve used have changed how I work.

Now if I can just get everyone else turned on to Mylyn …

- Jim