CollabNet and Tasktop Partner to Bring Eclipse, Mylar, Subversion and CollabNet Together

March 6, 2007; 05:53 AM
CollabNet, the primary sponsor of the Subversion open source project and leading provider of collaborative software development solutions, today announced that it has partnered with Tasktop Technologies, the company newly formed by the creators of the Mylar open source project, to seamlessly integrate Eclipse, Mylar, Subversion and CollabNet. The integration of these leading development tools is the first of its kind and creates a highly productive working environment that makes tasks an integrated part of the developer’s workflow throughout the lifecycle of a project.

Eclipse is rapidly becoming the IDE of choice for a large number of developers. Recent results from an EvansData survey show the continued momentum of Eclipse globally with the adoption rate more than doubling in the EMEA region. In parallel, Subversion has become the de-facto version control standard for globally distributed teams.

However, in order to maximize effectiveness, software development tools must be integrated at the developer desktop level where the highest productivity gains can be realized. “New standards for life-cycle integration, including Eclipse projects like Mylar, promise to simplify development tools integration,” writes Carey Schwaber in August 2006 Forrester Research report The Changing Face of Application Life-Cycle Management.

Because of the complexity of today’s enterprise applications, all modern IDEs overload developers with information. The lack of task integration across tools causes developers to waste an inordinate amount of time on switching from one context to another when multi-tasking.

“The Eclipse Mylar tool solves the information overload problem by integrating rich task management facilities with Eclipse”, says Mik Kersten, lead of the Mylar project (http://eclipse.org/mylar) and President & CTO of Tasktop Technologies. Mylar streamlines the developer workflow through its innovative Task-Focused UI. By showing developers only the information they need to see for any given task it improves productivity by removing the need for repeated searching, scrolling, and navigation.” Field studies of Mylar have validated with statistical significance that it makes developers more productive.

Eclipse and Subversion are already closely integrated through the Subclipse project. CollabNet’s partnership with Tasktop Technologies extends the Eclipse-CollabNet integration. Developers that are currently using Eclipse and CollabNet® Enterprise Edition will enjoy:

A simplified development environment

When working on a project, developers might have more than a dozen tools opened at the same time in different windows. The integration of Mylar and CollabNet simplifies the development environment and provides, within the Eclipse environment, access to the project tasks and artifacts managed in CollabNet Enterprise Edition.

Immediate Prioritization of Project Tasks managed in CollabNet Enteprise Edition

The integration between CollabNet and Mylar allows users to view CollabNet tasks from within Eclipse and enables Mylar’s automatic context management to only present the information that’s relevant to the task that the user is currently working on.

Improved productivity due to reduced information overload and easier multi-tasking

The consistent Eclipse-based UI between Eclipse, Mylar, CollabNet and Subversion, the prioritization of tasks and the one-click task switching, make developers a lot more productive.

“Since its inception, CollabNet has been committed to leading the industry in the tools and processes which allow software developers to collaborate more efficiently across geographically distributed teams,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “The deep integration of the Eclipse-based Mylar project and Subclipse capabilities into the CollabNet distributed software development platform is the first of its kind. It brings the task tracking capabilities of CollabNet across the development lifecycle directly to the developer’s desktop and within their IDE environment. This level of integration offers a quantum leap in software development productivity.”

The integration component will be available in April 2007 and will be downloadable at http://open.collab.net

About CollabNet

With more than 1 Million users, CollabNet is the most widely used collaborative software development platform. The company is transforming the way software is being developed by enabling many industry-leading companies to leverage global development talents to deliver better products and innovate faster.

Using CollabNet Enterprise Edition, project members can work as one team regardless of their location. Unlike traditional software development tools, CollabNet supports globally distributed teams in a cost-effective way, yielding unprecedented annual savings through reduced development infrastructure costs, increased productivity, improved project visibility and shared access to software assets. Founded upon open source principles, CollabNet is also the primary sponsor of the SubversionTM open source project, the new standard for version control.

CollabNet has been recognized for its leadership with 10 major industry awards in 2006 including the Red Herring and Always On TOP 100 Awards, and the SIIA Codie Award. Visit CollabNet at http://www.collab.net or get more information about Subversion at http://www.collab.net/subversion.

CollabNet is a registered trademark of CollabNet, Inc. or its affiliated companies. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

About Tasktop Technologies

Tasktop Technologies provides consulting, training and support for Eclipse, Mylar and Task-Focused programming and management. Tasktop is a new company formed by the creators of Mylar and inventors of the Task-Focused User Interface technology. In the near future, Tasktop will be distributing a tool suite that brings task focus to the developer’s entire workday by integrating Mylar with desktop and web based productivity applications. Tasktop’s goal is to bring about the Task-Focused Desktop, an environment that delivers to all knowledge workers the productivity benefits that are now available to developers using Mylar.

See http://tasktop.com for more information. Tasktop is a trademark of Tasktop Technologies Inc.