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The Eclipse Foundation March 8 announced a series of moves for its Mylyn project, including a number of subprojects and support for Web services standards efforts.
Eclipse officials said the new initiatives support the ongoing growth of the Eclipse Mylyn ecosystem. The open-source Mylyn project is a framework for integrating task and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools with the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).
The new projects include the “Tasks” project for integrating task and change management; “SCM,” or Source Code Management, for integrating source code management; “Build” for integrating build management and continuous integration; and “Review” for collaborative code review. The new subproject leadership will support a broader range of leading Agile software development vendors contributing to the ongoing evolution of Mylyn.
“The SCM project is going to provide new integrations between Mylyn and leading SCM systems,” said Mik Kersten, creator and leader of the Mylyn project and CEO of Tasktop Technologies. “And as part of this, we’re getting more vendors to participate in the Mylyn project.” Kersten said Perforce will take a leading role in the “Tasks” subproject.
“Mylyn’s rapid adoption by Agile and ALM vendors means that we now have to scale up both the integration frameworks and the governance,” Kersten said in a statement. “With more than a million monthly downloads, inclusion in nearly all Eclipse distributions and 45 ALM integrations, Mylyn and its ecosystem are ensuring that developers have first-rate task management tools integrated with the Eclipse IDE and the productivity benefits of the task-focused interface, no matter how diverse their ALM stack.”
The new subprojects have provided a channel for vendors in the ALM community to become more deeply involved with the Mylyn project. In addition to Perforce, organizations leading and contributing to the new subprojects include Rally Software for “Tasks,” Cloudsmith for “Builds” and INSO for “Review.” Also, Mylyn will now embrace the new Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) Web service standards for ALM.
“Tasktop and IBM share a common commitment to enabling interoperability across the ALM lifecycle,” said Scott Bosworth, IBM strategist and OSLC program manager, in a statement. “Both companies contributed to the initial OSLC change management API, which set the stage for the even broader ALM scope and industry participation that the OSLC community is experiencing today. We expect the new Mylyn subprojects to accelerate adoption of OSLC’s open interfaces for ALM interoperability.”
At its core, Mylyn provides integrated and personalized task management through its task-focused interface. As the Eclipse IDE’s adoption has grown beyond Java, Mylyn has extended its support to programming domains such as mobile C/C++, PHP and Spring Framework-powered enterprise Java applications.
“Thanks to its broad ecosystem of open-source and commercial integrations, Mylyn now supports nearly all of the popular ALM tools used by Eclipse users,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. “Mylyn will extend this reach by growing the community of committers and contributors working to make Mylyn an industry-standard framework for Agile ALM.”
“Mylyn’s success comes from broad bottom-up adoption by developers,” said Kersten. “While the new Mylyn subprojects will provide reference integrations to popular open-source ALM tools such as Bugzilla for Tasks, Git for SCM and Hudson for Build, the growing demand for Mylyn in the enterprise is being met by Tasktop Pro, which integrates a diverse range of commercial tools for Agile ALM.”
Kersten said the group of vendors that have expressed interest in the new Mylyn proposal include AccuRev; Atlassian; Cloudsmith; CollabNet; HP; IBM; Microsoft; Perforce; Polarion; Rally Software; Sonatype; SpringSource, a division of VMware; Tasktop; ThoughtWorks Studios; VersionOne; and Zend.
The project restructuring proposal, including a list of participating vendors, is at http://www.eclipse.org/project-slides/mylyn-restructuring-review.html.