Andrew's ramblings

Using Mylyn with ColdFusion Development

Tags: Coldfusion, Mylyn

If you are not familiar with Mylyn or how it can be a benefit to you as a developer, I guarantee you that when you begin using it you will wonder why you didn't use it before now.

So what is Mylyn?

As described from the Mylyn website:

"Mylyn is a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors your work activity to identify relevant information, and uses this task context to focus the user interface on the task-at-hand. This puts the information you need at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylyn also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise."

If you have downloaded any other eclipse package other than Classic you will have Mylyn as part of you package, setting it up is very easy as selecting the view Task List and Task Repositories.

Out of the box it can connect to 2 repositories, one of those is a local repository and the other is BugZilla. Most of us who use Jira will need to go and get the plugin to install for use with Jira, and once you have done that the usage is the same regardless of which repository you use.

So how is it good for us as a developer?

The short answer is that in our development life cycle we are often editing files, making changes and fixing things that can be all over the place. And in the middle of doing that we may need to stop, and work on another task at hand. The problem arises when we need to go back to the previous task in whatever time frame, from 10 mins to weeks we need to remember what files we had been working on.

Well this is where Mylyn enters, if you start working on a task and activate that task. Any file that is then opened will be attached to that task, this means that when you stop the task to work on another task, you can safely begin that task at any time in the future, and know that all those files will automatically open up again in Eclipse.

The other benefit to us as a developer here is that we no longer need to stop and begin to calculate what time we spend on each task as this is automatically done for us as well, and recorded against that task that you setup.

Now if you work with a Task Repository such as Jira then you can create tickets, add comments reassign and all the normal stuff the connector allows you to do right from within the Eclipse workspace.

Once you begin using it, I think you'll see the benefits in a heartbeat.