As applications get larger and more complex, finding the piece of code that you’re working on can become a challenge akin to finding the needle in a haystack. This week, the Eclipse Foundation is officially releasing the first production version of Mylar, a task list designed to show developers only the work items that are assigned to them.

Mylar superimposes a task list on the core Eclipse tool, not adding any new panes. It draws data from existing repositories of tools such as the open source Bugzilla issue tracking tool or other third party products that explicitly support it. 

The goal was designing the new tooling add-on to be as non-intrusive as possible. Consequently, the only additional steps that developers must take in order to use it are to click open a work space, or close it when the task is done or the bug resolved. Otherwise the task list updates automatically based on what’s in the underlying repository of the source tool.

And, supporting the reality that most developers are constantly juggling multiple tasks and bug fixes through the day, Mylar lets you switch tasks without losing your place. When you’re ready to switch back to your original task, Mylar will reopen the same windows and task flows that you had when you left off.

Additionally, Mylar lets you work offline because it runs on the Eclipse Rich Web Client. Ad if testers or other developers happen to be working on your project, they can flag bugs with s single mouse click and have it automatically populate your task list.

Eclipse Mylar was the brainchild of Mik Kersten, a former Xerox PARC researcher who had worked on the Eclipse AspectJ project, who made Mylar his PhD thesis at the University of British Columbia.

As part of the project, Kersten tried measuring just how bad the task search bottleneck really was. Tracking the time of 16 developers over the course of several weeks, he found in extreme cases, developers could spend twice as much time searching as they did in actual productive work.

With version 1.0 being released now, plans are to incorporate Mylar in the next major release of the Eclipse tools platform. At this point, CodeGear (the tooling successor to Borland), CollabNet, and the Apache Maven project have committed to supporting Mylar.

---