Mylar 1.0 was released. Reason enough to checkout the plugin and test the functionalities. The Project is a task focused extension for coupling tasks with units of work or resources in your Eclipse IDE. The main goal of Mylar is to associate your work with tasks from a task repository and the monitoring of your work. Dependend from your activity mylar tries to focus ui elements that are responsible for you and hides all the things that are not important for resolving the current task.

Task-Repositories

Mylar has the ability to connect to an Repository Provider or to manage Tasks locally. I tried to connect to the Task-Management-System Jira to load all relevant tasks. The repository bridge implemenation is managed via Extension-Points, there is also a bridge for bugzilla and you have the possibility to provide your own repository-bridge.

Task-List

Getting the Tasklist from Jira is realized by a query. The search-form you know from the Jira-Webinterface is implemented and you can retreive the tasks that match the query.

Scheduling and working on tasks

Once you have defined a query the results are updated periodically and you can start scheduling a task. If a task is scheduled you can start working on the scheduled task. Now Mylar gains momentum.

Information on scheduled tasks.

Mylar keeps track of the dates the task was scheduled, worked and resolved. The different fonts, decorators and colors representing the status of a task. It’s very useful for protocolling your daily work.

Monitoring your work

If you’re working on a task, Mylar monitors all your activites and tries to focus relevant UI-Actions and hide irrelevant things. I just tried it with simple Resources. Mylar hides all files and folders that remain untouched. So you just see the resources that are important for resolving the current task. In addition these context-settings remain assigned to the task, that means if you restart working on a task the state of these settings are restored.

Task resolved - Commiting resources

A big hit are the extensions on committing resources. Mylar binds also commits to tasks and generates commit-comments that are based on the task that was resolved by editing the resource you want to commit. With this comment you can follow all commits with a special task. On the other hand the CVS-plugin of Jira makes it possible to follow all CVS-commits that were affected by a task (issue).

Conclusion

Mylar is the long bitter missed link between your IDE and a task-management-system. The Jira connectior alone is a reason to love Mylar. With the plugin your work becomes more task-orientated. The enablement of task-relevant UI-Elements is IMHO a feature no developer wants to miss in the nearly future. Mylar has the potential to become the new superstar in the eclipse-sky.

Download

See http://www.eclipse.org/mylar