Mylar is one of the most exciting new technologies coming from Eclipse.org. Mylar is a task-focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, JIRA and now CodeBeamer. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylar monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what's related. Check Mylar News and Blogs at http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/archive.php. If you are new to Mylar, I strongly recommend to view recording of the Mylar introduction webinar presented by Mylar project lead Mik Kersten at http://www.eclipse.org/community/webinars2006.php#Mylar.

CodeBeamer from Intland Software, GmbH is a highly scalable collaborative software development platform that integrates individuals into teams and teams into enterprises for the purpose of collaborating, knowledge sharing and working effectively from diverse locations. Detailed feature list of CodeBeamer is available at http://intland.com/products/codebeamer.html. You can see CodeBeamer in action at JavaForge.com, scalable project hosting website for open source Java projects. JavaForge provides all project management needs including basic web hosting, source code repositories, bug trackers, forums, wikis, and document repositories. Not only that, be all projects come standard with the ability to execute ant builds in a continuous integration style build system, commit notifications for your repository, and the community that comes from being a part of the DeveloperZone Network.

CodeBeamer connector for Mylar gives you an access to bug/issue trackers in a project hosted at JavaForge.com (or any other hosting site powered by CodeBeamer). You can create bugs/issues in Eclipse, you can associate Mylar task context with the issues, you can query or search all trackers in your CodeBeamer managed project.

So go ahead, give Mylar a try (it is way cool), and if you use any of the bug tracking systems mentioned in this article (note, that Bugzilla, Jira, Trac connectors can be installed as part of the Mylar installation), install the connector and start using the "Power of Mylar 8-)".

Mylar is available at:

Mylar for Eclipse 3.2.x: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.2
Mylar for Eclipse 3.3Mx: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.3

CodeBeamer connector for Mylar is available at:

CodeBeamer connector for Mylar for Eclipse 3.2.x: http://cbconnector.javaforge.com/update/codebeamer-3.2
CodeBeamer connector for Mylar for Eclipse 3.3Mx: http://cbconnector.javaforge.com/update/codebeamer-3.3

Developing the connector was fun, exciting and challenging endeavor. My thanks to Intland development team for giving me information and advice about CodeBeamer remote API. Big thanks to the whole Mylar team for great product, and especially to Mik Kersten, Eugene Kuleshov and Robert Elves for help and advice on mylar development mailing list.