Eclipse UI gets some help

Having received something of a pasting from developers at last week's EclipseCon in Santa Clara for being overly complicated, particularly in terms of the UI presented to developers, the Eclipse applications development environment now looks as though it may be getting some help.

CollabNet, which already produces collaborative development tools and sponsors the Subclipse project (that brings together Eclipse and the Subversion open source standard control tool for globally distributed development teams), has now joined with Tasktop Technologies.

Tasktop has recently been formed by the creators of Mylar, the task-focused UI that is already part of the Eclipse corpus. The aim is to integrate these tools to create a simplified and far more productive environment in which developers can work.

At the moment, developers working with Eclipse can have up to a dozen different tools open on the desktop at the same time. The object of the integration exercise is to create an environment where the number of tools windows open to the developer is reduced to just those specifically relevant to the project being worked on. This will use the ability of CollabNet's Enterprise Edition to give access to the project tasks and artifacts needed for a project from within Eclipse, while using Mylar's automatic context management tools to present only the information that is relevant to a specified task to the user.

Developers will only be able to download the integration component in April, at which time they should point their browsers here. ®