I’ve been reading about Mylyn for a little while now but haven’t had the opportunity to install it. After reading this post today from Adam Flater I thought it was about time I gave it a go.
For those that don’t know Mylyn:
Mylyn is the 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, and JIRA
Currently the downloads on the site only seem to be for Eclipse 3.3/3.4 but as I’m using Aptana (which bundles with Eclipse 3.2) I needed to use an earlier version of Mylyn.
I ended up finding the following URL and doing a ‘Software Update’ (help -> Software Updates -> Find and install -> Search for new features to install) in Eclipse:
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.2
There are 2 .jar which I needed to already have to successfully install the full Mylyn package (according to my Aptana), but as I don’t develop in Java I could remove them from the installation by unchecking the checkboxes on the “Software Updates” page.
- org.eclipse.jdt
- org.eclipse.pde.ui
If you don’t uncheck these then you won’t be able to install.
After that just restart Aptana and you’re done 
For some reason the perspective is called “Planning” and not “Mylyn”, in case you can’t find it!
There are some cool tutorials floating around for Mylyn including this one.
10 Comments
to get additional functionality out of mylyn (a interactive trac tab) you need to install the xmlrpc plugin for trac, works like a charm
mylyn is probably the plugin I love the most. If you do very much work on large and/or various projects, I’d rank this tool as must have/must use for you.
As a side note, if you are just trying out eclipse, or want to use similar set ups on many different machines, give pulse(http://www.poweredbypulse.com/) for eclipse a try. It takes the headache out of getting all of the dependencies right for eclipse configurations – plus your profiles are stored online so you have access to them anywhere. It is currently lacking in what it supports though(it is still in beta), so don’t get your hopes up to high yet. But it does look quite promising…
@pope – I’ve looked briefly at Pulse and it certainly has promise. Thanks for the info.
Just since this post comes up at the top of a “Mylyn Aptana” query on google, i thought i’d share that the url for having aptana (or any 3.2 build of eclipse) install mylyn from is now http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update-archive/2.0.0/e3.2
Fantastic, thanks Nater
one thing to note. is to make sure that you are using Trac v0.10 and NOT v0.11.
the Mylyn version that’s compatable with Aptana (Eclipse 3.2) was released before Trac v0.11 and they can’t connect.
If you’re already using v0.11 of Trac, you cannot downgrade, and if you have upgraded from 10 to 11, read here for more info: http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUpgrade
As far as I know, the only way to get it to work is to use an install of Trac v0.10 (with xmlrpc connectors and such).
I didn’t feel like abandoning my install and trying to do a backwards database migration for Trac, so the idea of of using Mylyn for my current projects is just a fantasy. Hopefully Aptana will update their Eclipse core version soon saving people from having to jump through so many hoops to do something that should theoretically be fairly simple.
I just get an error message while using the url from Nater: “Mylyn Bridge: Java Development (2.0.0.v20070628-1000) requires plug-in “org.eclipse.jdt”.”
Me too, same error message as Tim.
To Tim and Olivier,
Since you’re not developing Java with Aptana, uncheck
” * org.eclipse.jdt
* org.eclipse.pde.ui
” in the install and you should be fine.
Quoted from the Author:
There are 2 .jar which I needed to already have to successfully install the full Mylyn package (according to my Aptana), but as I don’t develop in Java I could remove them from the installation by unchecking the checkboxes on the “Software Updates” page.
* org.eclipse.jdt
* org.eclipse.pde.ui
If you don’t uncheck these then you won’t be able to install.
Excellent! Thanks Michael and Nater… Aptana rocks!!!