When I migrated my development environment to Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede, one of the things that caught my attention on Eclipse’s update website was a plugin called Mylyn. A visit to the website, a look over the webcast and it sounded something promising.

It definitely is! Mylyn is a task manager that changes your IDE context based on tasks. You create a task, add resources to its context and when you activate the task, it hides all the other (unneeded) resources from your views (project/package explorer, outlines, editors, etc…). It provides integration with several task repositories, like Bugzilla and Trac. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide a connector to Clearcase, but I’m still able to use it in an automated way.

I find the tool really awesome when I do something basic like switching tasks: it just closes all the editor windows and projects in the explorer for the task I’m leaving and opens all the files I was working on for the task I’m switching to. This would take me several minutes to do by myself, so having a tool that does that in 1 second is pretty neat!

Here are some more things I like about Mylyn:

• ability to customize CVS/SVN checkin comments based on templates. Most, if not all, of my commit comments are in the form of “Bug#xxxxx: 1 line description of the bug and fix”. With Mylyn, I can get the comment populated automatically with information from the associated task.
• when I (re)activate a task, it positions the cursor in the file and method (if java file) I was working on.
• I can use the URL feature to link to the Clearcase defect page for each one of my defects
• dynamically adds resources as we follow method references
• Mylyn filters unrelated content from all views, but I especially like the end result for the package explorer and outline view. When working with classes that have tens of methods, showing just a handful of them in the outline simplifies things a lot!

And the things I don’t like that much:

• no connector to Rational ClearCase. I have to copy some notes and Defect info from Clearcase to my task manually.
• the option to show filtered content only shows content at the same level. I would like to have a “show all” option for when I need to look for some resource.
• It slows down the system a bit. Not too bad, but I do notice it when I have several eclipse instances running.

Overal, I think Mylyn is a great tool and very useful! Even more if you are working with Bugzilla/Trac projects.

If you want to give it a try, this is Mylyn’s homepage and this is a Mylyn tutorial.