Lets have some fun. Lets do a hands-on!
Wow, Vegas will be my fourth community day so it's time to do something new. Inspired by the SAP Mentor Moments at Sapphire/ASUG'08 in Orlando initiated by our fellow SAP Mentors I also do not wanna miss out and will offer a hands-on session.What is this Mylyn stuff anyway?
Every once in a while new development tools get introduced which radically change the way we work. I still remember when I first saw somebody use code-completion in Visual Studio and then Eclipse. Wow, it totally changed the way IDE's are structured and now there is basically code completion everywhere.So what is so special about this Mylyn plug-in then? Typically IDE's are structured around development objects. However outside of the IDE tasks dominate your workday. Mylyn tries to bridge these two islands by making tasks a first class paradigm in the Eclipse IDE.
[Photo source: http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/]
How it works
First you create a task you want to work on e.g. "Fix bug XYZ" then you activate that task. Now, Mylyn now records all your interactions with development objects within the IDE in a so called task context. Based on that context views in the Eclipse IDE change and only show things which are related to your task. I admit this is hard to understand without seeing it in action which is one of the reasons why I want to do a hands-on. For a brief introduction have a look at this screencast.What will we do?
During the session I will cover the following topics:- explain the main concepts behind Mylyn
- show how to set up and use the plug-in
- talk about some tips and tricks which might help you to use Mylyn more effectively
- have a brief look at the basic architecture of Mylyn and how you can extend it