Mik Kersten, Creator of Eclipse Mylyn

Mik Kersten is the President and CTO of Tasktop Technologies, lead of Mylyn and member of the Eclipse Architecture Council and Board of Directors.

While on the AspectJ team at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tool support. He then created Mylyn and the Task-Focused Interface during his PhD at the University of British Columbia. Mik likes building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done.

Presentation: "Eclipse, Mylyn and the task-focused interface"

Track: Java Emerging Technologies

Time: Thursday 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Metro 1

Abstract:

Mylyn's task-focused interface has changed the way that many developers work. Current IDEs are overloaded with tens of thousands of artifacts, and as a result developers often spend more time searching, scrolling, and navigating than they spend programming. Mylyn focuses the Eclipse UI to show only the information relevant to the task-at-hand. This makes working with large systems much easier and multitasking effortless.

This talk will start with an overview of Mylyn's task management features including offline editing, background synchronizations and change notifications, and demonstrate how these work for repositories such as Bugzilla and JIRA. Demonstrations of the tool will show how developers can leverage Mylyn's automated context management to get a dramatic productivity boost when working with Java, Eclipse plug-in, and web applications. Mylyn's context sharing and change set management will then be used to show the tool can make the entire team more productive by realigning interaction around tasks.

The second part of the talk will overview how Mylyn's frameworks can be extended when building IDE, desktop, and server-side applications. A showcase of the ecosystem of tools built on Mylyn will cover tools ranging from task repository connectors for agile development to novel user interfaces for rich internet applications. The talk will conclude with an overview of how Mylyn-based tools can bring the benefits of the task-focused interface to non-programmers engaged with the software development process.

Presentation: "Panel: How does the Open Source trend in Java affect your design and development process?"

Track: Java Emerging Technologies

Time: Thursday 15:45 - 16:45

Location: Metro 1

Abstract:

When Java 1.0 was released in 1995, closed-source and proprietary software were the norm and the idea of open source was not a common one, being confined primarily to the academic arena. Today open source software is a major force in the marketplace, and the Java language and platform has been one of the primary beneficiaries of this shift.

This panel discussion with several influential leaders of the software development community will discuss and debate the effect of open source upon the Java language, the variety of open source Java projects which are now available for developers to use, and the effect that the drive towards open source has had upon the business models of those who develop products and solutions in Java.