A few days ago Pramatr announced the release of WebIssues Mylyn Connector. Mylyn is a task framework for the Eclipse IDE which can connect to many popular issue trackers. With the WebIssues Connector you can now use Mylyn to access, create and modify issues directly within Eclipse without having to install the WebIssues Client. See the release announcement for more information.
One of the main design goals of WebIssues is to build a platform for accessing information from many different environments, including desktop, web, and integration with other applications. The connector is surely a great step in that direction. Pramatr also created a WebIssues Protocol API for Java which allows communicating with the WebIssues Server. We will be collaborating together to provide even more functionality with version 1.0 of WebIssues.
In the meantime we made significant progress with the WebIssues Web Client, which is almost ready for the alpha release. There is still some work to do with the Desktop Client, so the most realistic date of the release is beginning of May. Although it will be a testing only version and will be far from being complete, it will have many new features, including better internationalization support, extended attribute types and a completely redesigned issue details view.