Eclipse clears developer clutter

The Eclipse Foundation, with an open source technology release on Monday, hopes to alleviate developers of clutter.

Eclipse Mylar 1.0 is a task-focused user interface that reduces information overload and makes it easier to multitask, according to Eclipse. Mylar addresses a fundamental problem: that IDEs have made it easy to browse large systems with thousands or millions of lines of source code but they present too much data, said Mik Kersten, the project lead for Mylar.

“They overload developers with so much information,” Kersten said.

“[Developers] can often spend more time looking for the information they need by browsing and searching than they actually spend programming,” Kersten said.

Accessible here, Mylar enables developers to focus on specific jobs at hand by bringing a task list view into the Eclipse IDE. Developers indicate which tasks they are working on and Mylar monitors all programming activities to create a task context featuring all information relevant to that task. Contexts can be shared with other developers.

Mylar’s name was derived from the plastic film used to prevent blindness when viewing an eclipse. In the case of Eclipse’s Mylar, “it prevents information blindness when staring at the Eclipse IDE,” Kersten said.

“This integrates across the entire Eclipse IDE,” Kersten said. The task management facility is called a task-focused user interface. Also incorporated into Mylar is access to issue trackers such as Bugzilla. By integrating issue-tracking into the IDE, developers no longer have to toggle back and forth between browser and e-mail client to use an issue tracker.

Developers also can work with Bugzilla reports offline and then reconnect afterward. Additionally, developers can be summoned to immediately work on a task that can show up in their task list.

Mylar’s context filtering and task management drew praises from analyst Michael Cote of RedMonk. Task-filtering is automated, as opposed to it being manually done before, he said.

“When I’ve used Eclipse in the past, you can manually create a focus that filters out everything. But with Mylar, it can automatically create that focus for you, so it’s less work on your part to create the focus,” Cote said. “Because it’s done programmatically, it can get a better sense of things that are related that you may not think of.”

But Mylar’s freely available innovation could encroach on commercial products, Cote said. “I think this is the start of something that could do that, certainly,” he said.

“There’s always encroachment with Eclipse,” Cote said.

Rational with its Jazz project offers technology similar to Mylar but on a much larger scale, Cote said, but Mylar could be expanded with capabilities now offered commercially.

Mylar in its first version is developer-focused while other technologies in the space have capabilities such as application lifecycle management, Cote said.

Mylar can be embedded into existing commercial products, Kersten said. It solves the problem of developers having to cope with multiple task managers that offer an inconsistent experience, he added. Third parties also can innovate on top of Mylar. Vendors including CollabNet and Borland are committed to using Mylar, he said.