You can ship fast or you can ship twice. The teams that ship once usually have repeatable builds.If your jar changes from laptop to laptop, you are not unlucky, you just need Maven to keep your house in order. Maven is not a silver bullet, but for repeatable builds it…
Category: Productivity & Workflow
Tools, techniques, and workflows that make developers more effective. IDEs, debugging, build tools, and productivity hacks for modern software development.
JCreator and Lightweight Workflows
JCreator and lightweight workflows Java is everywhere and this week got even louder with Oracle saying it will buy Sun. In the middle of that noise we still have to ship code. A lot of us bounce between Eclipse and NetBeans, then watch the fan spin while the project indexes….
Why NetBeans Clicks for Me: Out-of-the-Box Power
I was on a late train with a lukewarm coffee and a stubborn bug. The kind that stares back and says you brought a knife to a gunfight. I had just installed NetBeans 6.5 on a spare laptop, clicked New Project, picked a Java web app, and hit Run. GlassFish…
BlueJ in Education: Teaching Objects Clearly
BlueJ keeps popping up in my inbox this month. With NetBeans 6 freshly out, Eclipse Europa still going strong, and Sun pushing Java hard in schools after freeing the source, a lot of teachers are choosing tools for the next semester. The question sounds simple: what should a first time…
Ant Patterns: Targets, Macros, Reuse
Ant Patterns keep popping up in every Java shop I visit. We all have a build.xml that grew from a quick copy into a small city. Some of us run CruiseControl on an old server in the corner. Subversion repos are busy. And while a shiny phone just stole everyone’s…
Eclipse Tricks that Save an Hour a Day
My morning started with a cold coffee, a failing JUnit, and a product manager pacing behind my chair. The kind of day where your editor either saves you or buries you. I opened Eclipse, stared at the red bar, and almost went for a rewrite when a tiny move saved…
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling
JDeveloper and Enterprise Tooling is not the flashiest topic for a Friday night, yet here I am past midnight with cold coffee and a grumpy app server. A teammate pings me on IM asking why our JSF page refuses to bind to a backing bean. I crack open Oracle JDeveloper…
Apache Ant for Legacy Pipelines
A quick story from the build room Yesterday a teammate spent an hour chasing a missing jar only to realize the classpath was set on his laptop but not on the build server. We moved the rule into Apache Ant and the next run just worked. No more tribal lore….
NetBeans vs Eclipse: Pragmatism over Plugins
“Pick the tool that gets you to working code by lunch, not the one that promises everything by next quarter.” NetBeans vs Eclipse is the coffee talk this season. I keep seeing the same pattern in teams I visit and projects I help clean up. One group swears by a…
Choosing a Java IDE: Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ
\n \n\n\n\n Pick the tool that makes you faster on a Tuesday afternoon when the bug list is longer than your coffee is hot. \n\n\n\n At the keyboard with three contenders \n\n\n\n I have three icons on my desktop right now. Eclipse. NetBeans. IntelliJ IDEA. All three open a project…