I had one of those “I love Mylyn“ moments today…
Why yes Mylyn, that’s exactly what I wanted to do with that problem (besides banishing it from my workspace).
It’s the little things that make you smile and see how far we’ve come with the IDE experience. It also makes you want to curse those who don’t think there’s a benefit to IDEs.
But seriously, give Mylyn a try if you aren’t using it already. If you don’t know what Mylyn is, watch this webinar.
Just in time for Christmas, a new project proposal called Mylyn Reviews was posted. Mylyn Reviews aims to take the work done in the ReviewClipse project and mend its notion of code reviews to Mylyn tasks.
Mik Kersten and I will be mentoring the project as it moves and begins its new life at Eclipse. I’m personally very excited to see this project coming to Eclipse and evolving. I see a future where code reviews are integrated into Eclipse as easy as Mylyn tasks are.
I don’t consider myself lazy, but there are certain things I don’t want to think about sometimes. For example, the Urbanspoon application on the iPhone has saved me from answering the question of what’s for dinner… I simply just have to shake my phone:
Mmm… burgers!
How is this related to Eclipse? Well, the Mylyn project just got a new feature based on one of my long standing requests:
Why is this useful? Well, there are times when I just want a task thrown at me versus something that I have scheduled in advance. I think it’s human to just want something new or different. The current algorithm I believe just picks a low priority task that’s not scheduled… it could be interesting to plug your own algorithm for assigning yourself a task. It could be as simple as a random task… it could be what is currently in place… or it could be something more sophisticated based on your preferences. Anyone have some thoughts?
Now only if I can shake my Macbook Pro to get Mylyn to assign me a task…
Note: If you want to try out this feature, grab the latest Mylyn 3.2 weekly build.
Some people say imitation is some form of flattery. In the software industry (especially in open-source), we see this a lot when people prune ideas and code from projects. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily… it could be if we keep repeating the same mistakes. I came across a recent example of “imitation” in the Eclipse ecosystem as I was messing with JavaScript a bit (using the JSDT) and noticed something familiar:
I’ve seen those preferences before in the JDT!
I than did a bit more investigation… I looked into what extension points are provided by JSDT:
I think I’ve seen those before too!
I think the JDT team should be flattered, right 
?
I’m not sure yet if “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but I know being stalked and copied can indeed be frightening:
Just a reminder that the latest installment of Eclipse’s BugDay is this Friday.
I have some good news for people getting started as our kind friends at Innoopract have setup some easy profiles using their cool Yoxos On Demand Eclipse Distro service. They are *beta-testing* this type of functionality to see what type of reception it gets from the community. What do profiles mean in this case? Well, a profile will give you everything you need to get started like plugins, mylyn queries for the bugs and triage as well as a PSF.
I encourage other committers to get involved with bugday if they have the time. Just today I helped someone on IRC with a simple bug that never contributed anything to Eclipse. In this process he learned about working with Eclipse’s repository, the importance of self-hosting and how to use Mylyn. I know I could’ve just committed the simple fix myself, but taking someone through the process has value as it’s a good Eclipse community building exercise.
Take care!
It looks like the SpringSource people have taken a cue from Eclipse in having their own version of a release train to help with the various Spring-related technologies out there.
I hope that this is a sign that other open-source communities will follow this release train practice. Once this happens, we can start thinking about staging the various release trains so they are synchronized.
For example, imagine that one week after the Ganymede release train happened, SpringSource had its release train occur. I believe this would promote better unity amongst open-source communities, especially communities that depend on each other in one way, shape or form.
Here’s just a reminder that Eclipse BugDay is upon us again. I actually managed to participate this time around and fix an issue in Mylyn that bothered me to no end. If you have time in your day today to go through some bugs, please do so. Here’s some interesting ones from PDE:
- [154206] – Ensure that bin.includes does not refer to the source
- [199098] – [Schema][Editors] Duplicate names are allowed from source page
- [208742] – NLS of WorkspacePluginModelBase only works if resource is called plugin.properties
Good luck bug squashing!
Well, I’m off on my Asia adventure today. This involves being on a plane for 24 hours but, I think it will be worth it once I get to talk Eclipse and plug-ins at JAX Asia next week. My offer of discussing Eclipse over a frosty beverage always stands if anyone is in the Singapore area
A long trip on a plane for me can only mean one thing, productivity. I plan to squash some Eclipse bugday bugs on the plane ride, one of them being one of my favorite Eclipse pet peeves: wizards that suffer from amnesia. I also plan to work on some new articles that will discuss some plug-in development best practices that I’ve learned over the years and touch on some aspects of PDE that aren’t understood well (ie., the target editor, automated management of dependencies, plug-in search, etc…).
I’ve also been looking over EclipseCon submissions for the tracks I’m chairing. It’s going to be really tough to choose the long talks… there’s a lot of good submissions with not many slots to fill. There’s also some really good short talks and tutorial submissions this year. Why do you guys have to make it so hard 
?
On a side note, if you’re interested in a rich text editor in Eclipse, voice your support on this bug which aims to make the sexy editor out of the EPF project consumable for third parties. In case you want a sneak peak at the editor’s features, Philip Beauvoir has already done some work in this area to make the editor consumable in an RCP application.
Remember to rock the vote on Eclipse bugs you care about 
Do you like those little notification pop-ups that Mylyn and RSSOwl do? Do you like Pop-up Video?
If so, please voice your support on this enhancement request against the Eclipse Workbench to include support for a standard desktop notification pop-up.
I think this is a great idea as I’ve seen a lot of questions on how to do those “Mylyn pop-ups.” Plus, the ability to notify users in a fairly discrete manner is nice.
On my way to the Equinox Summit with a 160 minute layover in Chicago, I was hacking a bug to add execution environment selection and validation to PDE (thanks Gary) when I noticed this in a recent build of Mylyn:
Thanks Mylyn! I was waiting for the ability to edit those Bugzilla keywords. Now we just need to figure out how to work with bugzilla flags without me opening a web browser.
By the way, if you haven’t tried out Mylyn, I’d recommend it. It has some nifty features that I can’t live without these days:
- offline bugzilla browsing while on an airplane
- ability to attach contexts to bugs to help new contributors navigate the PDE codebase
- ability to apply patches from within Eclipse without opening a silly web browser
- somewhat easy screenshot attachment to bugs
Recent Comments