Textile-J Is Moving to Mylyn WikiText

Textile-J is moving into the Eclipse Mylyn project incubator! As part of the move, Textile-J is taking on a new name, as the Mylyn WikiText component. More details about the incubator can be found at the Mylyn WikiText homepage.

As a Mylyn-incubated project Textile-J and Mylyn will both benefit. This page outlines the reasons behind the move, what it means for Textile-J users, how to migrate code to the new APIs, and how to get involved in the Mylyn community.

Reasons behind the move

The decision to move Textile-J was made primarily because I wanted Mylyn to provide first-class support for lightweight markup. Below is a summary of benefits to both projects:

Benefits to Textile-J

• The Textile-J user-base will increase significantly (the Mylyn community is hundreds of thousands of users) thus improving the quality of Textile-J via increased exposure.
  • Usage of Textile-J for different Mylyn connectors will mean increased usage of markup languages. Until now Textile-J has seen good usage of the Textile language, however others such as MediaWiki and Confluence could use some real-world exposure.
• Textile-J will be readily available for use by Eclipse-based software. Since Textile-J will be available on standard Eclipse update sites (and their mirrors) third party software vendors will be able to use lightweight markup while still maintaining a simple installation procedure.
• Textile-J will be published under a more liberal license, the EPL.
• Textile-J will be supported by a larger community of committers and contributors.

Benefits to Mylyn

• Mylyn will be able to display lightweight markup as it is intended. Most issue-tracking systems support some kind of lightweight markup. Mylyn will now be able to provide a markup-aware editor and display markup properly even when off-line.
• Mylyn will be able to publish the MediaWiki-based user guide inside the Eclipse help system.

What This Means for Textile-J Users

Textile-J users will be able to continue to use binaries and sources from the java.net Textile-J project, however support, issue resolution and new features will decrease over time as the focus transitions to the Mylyn WikiText project.

Getting Mylyn WikiText

Binaries may be obtained from the Mylyn Downloads page as described there, under the 3.x Weekly Builds section using the incubator update site.

Sources may be obtained from the Eclipse CVS server at :pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/tools (HEAD) under org.eclipse.mylyn/sandbox. See the CVS HowTo for details.

Migrating to the New APIs

The WikiText APIs are generally the same as the Textile-J APIs, with some package changes. Also the WikiText code has been split into distinct projects for each markup language.

Class name and package name changes are summarized as follows:

Getting Involved

Please get involved! The Mylyn Community page provides details on getting involved, and watch the Eclipse Bugzilla for issues in the Tools/Mylyn/WikiText area.