[mylar-dev] implementing model bridges in Mylar

[Eugene Kuleshov <eu@xxxxxxxx>]

 Right now Mylar can be extended in two ways:

-- Additional connectors for the issue tracking systems
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylar_Integrator_Reference#Creating_Connectors

-- Additional bridges to integrate context model (filtering, tracking 
interest etc).
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylar_Integrator_Reference#Creating_Bridges

 While connector integration is quite straight forward, bridges wasn't 
advertised much and still are kind of black box for most of the Mylar 
users and contributors.
 Essentially bridges should allows tighter integration between Mylar 
and custom editors and non-Java oriented tools, such as CDT, RTD and 
number of others.

 I made some attempts to implement Mylar bridge for some custom editors 
but faced few issues. The most difficult one is to link selection 
provider with the logical model used by the custom editor. Thet means 
you have to use editor's internal classes to do that. Obviously this 
will require to either have dependency from Mylar to the editor, or from 
the editor to Mylar.

 I don't think 1st case is an option, because Mylar can't know about 
all custom models and development and support of all that stuff will be 
real nightmare.

 2nd option look little better in theory, but it is unclear how many 
plugin owners would want to have dependency on Mylar (even optional 
one). Though it would help if Mylar would provide minimally required set 
of dependencies for that.

 On the other hand there is another option that may work better and 
could allow to actually take almost the same path as for case 1. This 
could be possible if Mylar would allow to use dynamic scripting 
languages (javascript, beanshell, groovy, jruby) to wire logical model. 
In that case there will be no dependency at the build time and adding 
new models could be even done dynamically (e.g. using some sort of 
configuration UI that would allow to paste some script fragments).

 Eclipse already has some sort of support for stuff like this and it 
might be interesting to investigate it further.

http://www.eclipse.org/dash/
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/Groovy+Monkey

 regards,
 Eugene

PS: are we getting new dev build any time soon? I think it is been two 
weeks since last one...