The Textile-J project announced today that it is moving to Eclipse as the Mylyn WikiText component. Textile-J, now WikiText, is a library for parsing and displaying lightweight markup languages (wikitext). With the addition of WikiText, Mylyn and Tasktop will be able to display markup as it is intended and provide a markup-aware authoring environment.

The move was primarily motivated by my desire to see Mylyn provide first-class support for lightweight markup languages in its task editor. Even though most issue-tracking systems provide support for markup (for example Trac and JIRA), WikiText can also benefit those who use issue-tracking systems with no markup support. For example, using Bugzilla with WikiText will enable users to use markup in their descriptions and comments.

Overall I'm very excited about the move to Mylyn WikiText, as it will not only improve Mylyn and Tasktop but will also benefit existing Textile-J users by ensuring a higher quality library. In designing the move I built some protection for existing Textile-J users into the WikiText project charter so that existing users will be able to continue using WikiText independently of an Eclipse runtime. This is important for users that have integrated Textile-J into their non-Eclipse projects and for those who use the Textile-J Ant tasks.

This project move has been many months in the making, and with the backing and help of the Mylyn team has finally come to fruition. Many thanks go to the team, especially Seffen Pingel, Mik Kersten and Jingwen 'Owen' Ou for their help in making this a reality.

WikiText is available immediately for download from the Mylyn incubation weekly update site. To find out more about WikiText, see the original announcement and the WikiText project homepage.