While the Spring project has always developed its tooling using Eclipse, the company SpringSource only now made it official: it’s now joined Eclipse. And with it, it is unveiling a beta of its toolset that is choreographed by the Mylyn Task Interface, the plug-in that organizes tasks for Eclipse developers.

Mylyn appears in the same pane as your Eclipse development tool, drawing data from existing repositories such as Bugzilla so you can winnow down exactly the tasks that you need to perform, and where there are interdependencies, in which sequence. It is task-specific, and is triggered when the developer opens a workspace, and closes it when the bug or development task is completed. Recognizing that most developers multi-task, you can switch to different tasks without losing your place. 

Mylyn not only organizes the tasks to using SpringSource’s Java container and web flow tools, but it also allows SpringSource to embed context- or  task-focused tutorials and best practices covering only the relevant Java or XML artifacts. It also enables SpringSource to incorporate the kind of run-time error analysis that are customary with Visual Studio developers accessing MSDN.

At EclipseCon, another partner demonstrated integration with SpringSource. Skyway Software, which provides a model-based development tool based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), a creature that is quite different from UML, showed how it plugs into the Spring run time. (EMF is one of the new crop of domain-specific languages that concentrates on Java artifacts.)

Skyway also just joined Eclipse, with the conference providing the venue for unveiling a new release that migrated the tool from its former proprietary modeling framework and user interface.

At this point, the new SpringSource IDE, with integration to Mylyn, is in beta, with general availability set for later in April.

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