Java Power Tools

Chapter 25. Sharpen Your Focus with Mylyn

Introduction to Mylyn

Contributed by: Keith Coughtrey

Today’s development projects, and the environments we use to build them, are increasingly rich and complex, and informative. However, in practical terms, there is a limit to the amount of information human beings can deal with simultaneously. Mylyn is an innovative Eclipse plug-in that enhances developer productivity by providing integrated task management and a contextual view of the tasks you are working on.

Mylyn benefits developers in two ways. The first provides a convenient integration with issue management systems such as Trac (see Chapter 28), Bugzilla (see Chapter 27), and JIRA, allowing you to view and manage tasks held in your issue tracker from within the IDE. This in itself is appreciable, but Mylyn goes much further than that. Mylyn also provides a way to hide much of the detail of your projects that is irrelevant to the task at hand. It is this second aspect, called context management, that provides a real increase in developer productivity because it cuts down on the amount of navigating, searching, and scanning through trees, lists, and code looking for the parts that are of interest when working on a particular task—whether that be a bug fix or the development of a new feature. Indeed, Mylyn is based on the observation that when you work on a particular development task, you actually need only to look at and manipulate a relatively small number of files. By masking out ...