JavaBeans? Senseo pads!

I’ve never been a big fan of Eclipse. There was always something about it that made my skin crawl. It never reached the same level of usability of IntelliJ IDEA.

But now I have to admit that for the first time in my career I actually anticipated the release of a piece of software. I am even “ashamed” to say that I actually count down the hours and minutes of the official Eclipse Europa release. The main reason why I chose to give Eclipse a try for the fifth time is because of the great plugins that were released with it, one of them being Mylyn. I tried Mylyn out today and I have to say…I’m impressed. Of course, there are some minor bugs in it, but overall it works like a charm. It will take me some time to get used to the Task-Focused UI, but I can already see its benefits.

The main features I like about it are the integration with our issue tracker JIRA, task contexts and scheduling. When you think about it, it makes sense to view and manage your project’s issues inside your IDE. I mean, your code is right in front of you, why would you want to switch out of that mindset and use a web browser to visit your (sometimes slow and unhandy) issue tracker site and see what you’re supposed to do today?

But that’s not the great thing about Mylyn; it’s the task contexts that make a huge change in the way you work. When you start working on a task your package explorer immediately filters out everything that you don’t need. If you need to fix a bug in the Foo class, you only see the Foo class. Need to refactor a piece of Foo’s functionality to the Bar class? No problem, it will automatically be added to your task context. To top it all off, you can actually share your task context with your team. That means if I don’t have the time to finish a task, my colleague can take it over and immediately see what he’s supposed to focus on. Want to commit your changes to your version control system? No problem, Mylyn will group the changes you made to your classes per task. In effect, this makes it very clear to see what changes were made for each task.

I still have to work with Mylyn in a real-world project, but I think the chances are big that I will keep using it.