Yesterday’s Eclipse Indigo release delivered a year’s worth of improvements on what has become the de facto IDE platform for Java and beyond. The Java package has seen major additions, including the WindowBuilder tool that originated from Instantiations and the m2e plug-in that eases Maven-based builds. EGit 1.0 is an essential tool for the growing number of Eclipse developers using Git, and in addition the top-level project included new tooling for Hudson/Jenkins as well as early access support for Gerrit.
The Mylyn features in Indigo further entrench Eclipse as the leading IDE in terms of the application lifecycle management (ALM) tools needed for developers to collaborate around code. Most developers spend the majority of our time on application maintenance activities rather than the creation of new features, making the new traceability aspects of Mylyn and Mylyn-based tools increasingly important to large-scale application development. Out of the box you now get ALM support for the leading open source tools including Bugzilla, Trac, CVS, Git and Hudson. The rich ecosystem of both open source and commercial integrations available means that you can plug Eclipse into your own ALM stack and get the benefits of tasks-focused productivity and automated traceability across the vast majority of the leading task, issue, source and review management tools as visible below.
Other notable features in Mylyn 3.6 include automatic population of contexts on activation for tasks that contain stack traces, making it very simple to navigate to relevant sources when starting on a new task.
To emphasize the social nature of task-focused collaboration, the task editor now displays images for the assignee of a task. Thanks to the traceability that we provide between Hudson builds, tasks and code changes, putting these features together means that you now get to the faces associated with builds. Perhaps for the next release we should streamline things even further and use mapping to inline all the contributors’ Gravatar images in the build editor itself, to help give credit where it is due.
What’s key is the way that these features work together to make the Eclipse IDE be the collaborative console for the developer. The video below, recorded at the JAX conference in May, has Tasktop’s Steffen Pingel and Benjamin Muskalla illustrate the sort of open source ALM workflow automation that can be created using the new connectors and APIs and tools shipping with Mylyn 3.6. We hope that both this release and our ongoing efforts will continue to make your workday easier and more productive.
See the Mylyn 3.6 New & Noteworthy for more from the Mylyn 3.5 and Mylyn 3.6 releases included in Indigo.
