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[eclipse.org-committers] Technology Project Declaration: Mylar
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As per the Eclipse Development Process, we are notifying the Eclipse
Membership-at-Large of the intent of the University of British Columbia
to propose the Mylar project as part of the Technology PMC.
A brief description of the project is below. A project proposal will be
posted on http://www.eclipse.org/ in a week or so.
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Project Declaration for "Mylar"
When used on large systems, Eclipse views become overloaded with
elements. Tree views often contain deep hierarchies with thousands of
nodes, search results often contain hundreds of elements, and each needs
to be inspected carefully to find elements related to the task-at-hand.
The end result is that developers spend more time looking for the
information they need to get a task done than they do programming.
Although the Eclipse IDE is better than most for working on large
systems, features such as working sets still burden the developer with
manual configuration as tasks change. The problem is that the current
IDE user interface, which shows system wide slices of program structure,
does not scale to very large systems. As systems continue to grow, this
problem will continue to get worse. But no matter how complex a system
is, for any task that developers work on--any defect they fix or feature
they add--developers only care about a subset of the system.
Mylar proposes that the Eclipse user interface only needs to show
developers what they are working on. It does this by encoding
developers' editing and navigation activity in a degree-of-interest
model and using the standard Eclipse views, highlighters, filters,
sorters, and decorators to show only the relevant elements.
"Mylar" is:
a) An aluminized film used to avoid blindness when
staring at a solar eclipse
b) A user interface and interaction ‘skin’ used to
avoid information blindness when staring at Eclipse
