Ever felt like the NetBeans debugger is slowing you down, even when you know exactly what you want to see? The truth is the debugger is fast enough. It is us clicking too much, stepping where we should not, and ignoring a handful of tiny toggles that quietly shave minutes…
Category: Productivity & Workflow
Tools, techniques, and workflows that make developers more effective. IDEs, debugging, build tools, and productivity hacks for modern software development.
Migrating Ant to Maven: A Practical Path
\n I remember a Friday night release where our Ant build ran fine on my laptop and blew up on the build server. A jar crept into lib/ locally and never made it to source control. We shipped late, and someone swore the build fairy was cursed. That was the…
Why the JVM Still Wins: Portability, Tooling, Ecosystem
\n �So you are still betting on the JVM?� \n\n That is what a friend asked me over coffee after a long day of pushing pixels and chasing threads. Rails is shiny. Node is buzzing. VMs sound like something you only worry about when the ops folks ping you. I…
What to Do When Coverage Drops
The build light turned red at 1 in the morning. Hudson blinked like a small lighthouse in a foggy kitchen while I reheated pizza and hit refresh. Our latest merge went in clean, tests passed on my machine, life was fine. Then the email landed. Code coverage dropped by four…
Macros and Includes: Building Reusable Blocks
FreeMarker macros and includes sound like small features, but they rescue your templates from copy paste chaos. If you are shipping landing pages, transactional email, and a bunch of JSP views, you know the pain. Same button in five places, slightly different markup, one broken change ruins a campaign. With…
Testing Faster with Groovy: Lightweight Builders and Specs
Do your Groovy tests feel slower than they should? I have been bouncing between Grails projects, plain Groovy libs, and some Java work, and the same theme keeps popping up. Tests get heavy fast once you pull in a database, fixtures, and a stack of XML. Groovy 1.7 landed with…
Configuring KDevelop for Mixed-Language Workspaces
“The best editor is the one that gets out of your way once you set it up.” Creation date: 2010-03-11T01:41:47 KDevelop has been on my desk for a while, but this week I pushed it hard with a mixed language workspace. Think C plus plus with Qt, a bunch of…
Shortcuts and Navigation in KDevelop: Moving Faster
Shortcuts and Navigation in KDevelop: Moving Faster You write code, not click menus. The more you break your flow to hunt a file, a symbol, or a line number, the more your brain cools down. If your editor is KDevelop, you already have what you need to stay in the…
FindBugs and PMD: Fast Wins Before Code Review
Can two free tools cut your code review time in half without changing your stack, your habits, or your sanity? If you write Java, the duo is FindBugs and PMD, and they are sitting there waiting to clean up your pull before a single human reads it. With Oracle now…
Using KDevelop for Java Projects
KDevelop is known as a home base for C and C plus plus, yet I keep coming back to it for Java projects on Linux. With Oracle buying Sun and everyone guessing what that means for NetBeans, and with Eclipse Galileo everywhere, you might wonder why anyone would wire Java…