Unshackling Mylyn from the Desktop

Next week at EclipseCon, I'll be giving a talk with Gunnar Wagenknecht on our side project to bring a hosted task list to Mylyn. This is something that I'm really excited about and it will be the first time we are discussing this project in public. The Mylyn project was a truly ground-breaking project when it first became an Eclipse project back in 2005. It revolutionized the way that developers work with and manage the over-abundance of information in the IDE. Now, even though it is still a well-used and loved project, it has not been evolving at the same rate that developers' expectations have. Since being introduced, developers tend to be less tied to their IDE, using git on the command line, github in the browser, and email on a tablet. However, the Mylyn task list is stuck in the IDE.

In our presentation, we’ll be demoing a hosted task list, that can gather tasks from multiple task repositories (Jira, Bugzilla, etc), store them on a server, and then provides an open API to interact with them. The API is open, using a mix of REST and websockets, and this is the interesting part since the API allows you to build clients that interact with your task list in ways that were never possible before.

If you’re interested, I hope you’re coming to EclipseCon so you can see our talk. If not, you’ll have to wait until later when I have some time to write a proper blog post about this.