RE: [mylar-dev] Bug 160928: [connector] MKS Integrity

["Mik Kersten" <beatmik@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Kristina,

Great to hear that you're interested in integrating with Mylar.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mylar-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Kristina Taylor

> Now, all that being said, I have some questions:
> 1) Does the integration need to be released as a part of your product,
> or can it be part of our existing eclipse integration?

I think that it would be best to release this integration as part of your
Eclipse integration, since it is targeted at the MKS user community.  What
we could do on our end is link it from our site and make sure that it's easy
to install for new Mylar users who are on MKS.

> 2) We currently have our own version of an Eclipse Task list, called
> "MKS Worktray".  It has the ability to create new issues, edit issues,
> run a query, and deal with change packages.   How much of this
> functionality would we be able to integrate via "rich editing"?  Can
> Mylar connectors be organized so that our UI would be called when a user
> tries to edit a task?

Could you send some screenshots of the MKS Worktray in action?  That would
give me a better sense of how best to approach the integration.  The Mylar
Task List has a considerable amount of functionality that is related to rich
editing.  For example, it shows notifications of incoming changes, and
indicates when a query synchronization failed.  It is also the anchor for
managing the offline support, since only the tasks that the user has read
are stored offline, only changes tasks are synchronized, and all of this
state is maintained in the TaskList.  Now, we do have a loosely-coupled
architecture so you could actually use the TaskList (in ..mylar.tasks.core)
without using any of the UI stuff or having your users install it, but we
would need to figure out how much of the UI stuff you would need to
duplicate for MKS Worktray, and whether it is easier for you to extend or
integrate with Mylar's Task List. 

One thing to consider when deciding whether to integrate with or to replace
the functionality of the Task List is whether your developers will want the
Task List anyway.  In our experience developers work with three kinds of
tasks:
* The issues and tasks that make up their project (i.e. in MKS integrity).
* Bug reports and enhancement requests that they watch and create for the
other frameworks that they use (e.g. bugs against Eclipse, JEE, Spring). 
* Personal tasks and todos they need to make for themselves (via Mylar's
Task List).

For this reason a fundamental part of our approach is to give developers a
single view for managing all of their tasks, and to make it easy for vendors
to customize the content of the Task List and rich editors to meet their
needs (e.g. as JIRA does with custom task icon type overlays).  This is
discussed some in the following article:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylar1/

The other thing to consider is integration with Mylar's automatic context
management facilities.  Again, this is possible to integrate with a custom
view, but the Task List has been streamlined around the interaction needed
to make task activation easy.  More on that is here:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylar2/

> 3) What level of effort (# of developer days) do you think would be
> required for a reasonably proficient Java developer already familiar
> with Eclipse?

Integrating MKS queries either via a web connector template or via a
customized connector should not be much work, a week at most.  The amount of
work for the rich and offline editing we would need to figure out the
integration strategy wrt to question (2) above (e.g. if it involves
re-implementing rather than extending substantial parts of the Task List it
could be quite a bit of work since the ..mylar.tasks.ui is 25 KLOC).    

Mik

--
Mik Kersten, http://kerstens.org/mik
Mylar Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylar