Task based context with Eclipse and Mylyn

I've been exploring Eclipse Galileo's new features today and bumped into Mylyn. I've been missing latest Eclipse developments since I didn't have time to code for the last few years so I decided to get up to pace and checked this [[http://tasktop.com/videos/w-jax/kersten-keynote.html|webinar] about Mylyn.

What I heard/saw seemed quite interesting so decided to hava a closer look.

After watching the webinar and working on a few tasks on small java projects I must say I'm really impressed by the concepts behind Mylyn:

• Everything is about working in the context of a task and seeing only information relevant to that task
• Switching tasks becomes fast as the IDE does that for you; you decide to switch tasks, the IDE updates the context to where you left it
• It is all about hiding what is not relevant to the task to let you focus on what's relevant
• A context stores perspectives and views as well as open packages/files and whatever you have been browsing in the process of completing a task, e.g. files, webpages, javadoc, etc.
• Whatever you open in Eclipse while working on a task is automatically added to the context of that task
• The context can be shared and by doing so you will share knowledge

Well I must say really cool! No more switching perspectives and opening/closing tabs to get the overview on what I need to e.g. fix JUnit tests and quickly jump to some layout rework and cluttering my view by opening yet more files to answer an email. Instead I added the tasks I am working on right now (new layout, logging, fixing PDT and checkstyle findings and profiling). Now each task has it's context and I can switch from one context to another in no time.

While contexts can be stored locally - what I used for the last hour - I have now moved to bugzilla based tasks. Not really because I need that for organizing my own work but there are a few projects I work on with a firiend of mine and I want to experiment on sharing knowledge using the above mentioned contexts.

So there is more to follow