I spoke last Thursday at the Java Forum Stuttgart. This is a show that I really enjoy attending; the organization is great, the people are very nice, and Stuttgart is a nice city. I delivered two talks: one on Eclipse RCP and one on Mylyn. The RCP talk went well as usual. The room was filled to capacity (more than 100 people), there were several very good questions, and I believe that most people got what they were looking for. I don’t like admitting this, but there were at least a couple of people who I noticed close their eyes during the talk. That’s okay, I’ve been known to nod off myself once in a while.
Nothing of the sort happened in the Mylyn talk that followed (for those of you who haven’t heard, Mylyn is the new name for Mylar). I started the presentation with some slides liberated from Mik Kersten and Rob Elves’ EclipseCon 2007 talk. I changed the structure of the talk a little and added a few extra slides and bullets (and changed occurrences of “Mylar” with “Mylyn”). It’s a good talk, but I decided to change the flow and rather than do a bunch of demos woven through the presentation (like Mik and Rob do), I opted to do all the talking followed by all the demo’ing.
During the slide presentation, I felt like I was explaining a trick that I had seen a magician do the night before. Mylyn sounds fantastic, but I could sense cynicism in the crowd. How could it possibly be that good, I could sense people thinking. They were actually sitting on the edge of their seats. Nobody nodded off. Everybody was hanging on my every word. It was, in a word, awesome. Then I did the demo and watched the cynicism wash away from their faces. I could feel the wave of energy and excitement. I had a similar experience discussing Mylyn at the JUGC “Unshootout”. Mylyn changes the way that you write code. Mylyn is awesome.
So my new reason to love Mylyn is that as well as being incredibly useful, it demos well. Really well. Mylyn makes me feel like a rock star.
On a side note, among 120-ish or so German-speakers in the audience during my talk, not one of them seemed to know the German word for “collaboration”. Ralph seems to think that it’s because Germans don’t need a word for something that they just do naturally (along the same lines as why we call it “hockey” and not “ice hockey” like much of the rest of the world, I suppose).
Eclipse Hints, Tips, and Random Musings 
> Mylyn makes me feel like a rock star.
Ha! I love this quote. I’m going to have to work it into one of my own presentations somehow. In the meantime, we need to make it easy for others to feel just as good as Wayne does 🙂 To help this along I put together a page that provides easier access to our latest slides:
http://eclipse.org/mylyn/presentations/
Wayne, it sounds like your presentation was fantastic. Consider attaching the slides or an Eclipse Live link to the bug listed on that page so that we can link it.
Mik
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Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylyn
Do you have your slides somewhere Wayne? I’m looking to prune content for an AustinJUG presentation that I’ll be doing soon.
Wayne, maybe you just misinterpreted cynicism with hard to read slides. While scanning trough them I felt like looking at the sun without sun glasses (almost literally). No offense, but white text on dark non-uniform background is much harder to read. Though it might did the trick to keep them interested until the demo come… 🙂
> Mylyn makes me feel like a rock star.
Ha! I love this quote. I’m going to have to work it into one of my own presentations somehow. In the meantime, as Chris points out, we should make it easy for others to feel just as good as Wayne. To help this along I put together a page that provides easier access to our latest slides:
http://eclipse.org/mylyn/presentations/
Wayne, your presentation sound like it was fantastic, please consider attaching it or an Eclipse Live link to the but reported listed on that page so that we can include it with the Mylyn materials.
Eugene, I’ve tried two iterations of that slide background. I’m trying to make something a little less–how can I put this nicely–boring. Clearly, this isn’t the answer. Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve always called Mylar my dirty mistress 😉
Wayne, you keep sending mixed signals. Do you like Mylyn or not?
🙂
> I’ve always called Mylar my dirty mistress 😉
Chris, unfortuantely your dirty mistress has legally changed her name to a much more masculine sounding one, so that phrase might start sounding even more weird 🙂
Chris, don’t you supposed to bring some presents to your mistress? 😉
There are many areas that could be improved, but project team unlikely will have time for, especially context bridges for domain specific stuff…
Wayne, your presentation was very good. I enjoyed it. Keep up your amusing presentation-style. 🙂
It was a pity, that you had to present Mylyn offline 😦
Hi Wayne, the German word for “collaboration” is “Zusammenarbeit” (in the sense of working together on s.th.). The direct translation “Kollaboration” has a strong negative connotation, meaning “working together with your enemy” – see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kollaboration#Kollaboration_als_Zusammenarbeit_mit_dem_Feind.
I never quite understood why UML collaboration diagrams are called Kollaborationsdiagramme in German…
Eugene said:
> Wayne, maybe you just misinterpreted cynicism with hard to read slides…No offense…
While I found the tone of this post offensive, as with most posts that say “no offense”, I tried to ignore it. But feel like I can’t quite do that because it comes from a Mylyn committer. Wayne, while it is impressive that you found the grain of feedback in that comment, please do note that this kind of communication goes against our guidelines that we have have established: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_Contributor_Reference#Communication
> There are many areas that could be improved, but project team unlikely will have
> time for, especially context bridges for domain specific stuff…
To clarify, Mylyn bridges that are outside of the Eclipse SDK are outside of the scope of the Mylyn project (http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_2.0_Plan#Scope). In other words, out of the box Mylyn provides a bridge for Java code via JDT, Ant, PDE, and generic resources. What we are doing for the vast number of relevant bridges to build for tools outside of the SDK is to help integrators build them via bug reports and the new mylyn-integrators@eclipse mailing list. The Eclipse DLTK project and Spring IDE have been leading the way with their bridge implementations and and we really look forward to helping others do the same.
I attended both talks on Java Forum Stuttgart and I surely can confirm that they were really entertaining and some of the best of the day. Good job, Wayne, keep on going!
I think why the crowd (including me) got so excited about MyLyn is, while not all are developing RCP applications, most are using Eclipse and care about an improvement of hiding complexity in the UI when digging through 10 000 of classes in big projects.
I started to use MyLyn about two weeks ago before this talk and while there is some need in changing the way I used Eclipse I really appreciate this plugin, especially since performance improvements in Eclipse 3.3.
> In other words, out of the box Mylyn provides a bridge for Java code
> via JDT, Ant, PDE, and generic resources.
I should have clarified, that there is a plenty room for improvements even for PDE support. For instance, filtering of the Outline view don’t quite work for plugin.xml editor and Extension tab on that editor could also use context-based filtering. There should be more cases like that.
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