6 posts tagged “java”

I'm a fan of refactoring, and I pretty much always hit Ctrl-Shift-O in Eclipse (organize imports). It's such an easy hit, and removes a few compiler warnings. Little did I know that there's a much better way: Guide to refactoring in Eclipse 3.2.

I'm not sure how I managed to miss that wizard, but the Clean Up wizard will actually clean up the imports, remove unused variables and more for your entire project.

My favorite Eclipse refactoring shortcut is still "Extract Method", though.

Struts now (experimentally) supports using annotations for configurations.

We're using Stripes, which also uses annotations instead of XML files, but this makes me want to check out Struts 2.0.

I finally got time to set up CruiseControl at work, so now we have automated builds. The X10 kit I bought worked without any problems, and the latest version of CruiseControl even comes with the X10 plugin included.

I didn't buy lava lamps yet, but I connected it to a regular desk lamp and a lamp with a black light.

When I first told a few people that the lamps were connected to the automated build, a couple of them thought I was joking.

"You're kidding, right?"

It's not lava lamps, and it's not an Orb, but there is still a collective "ooooh!!" when the build breaks and the light goes on.

Cool.

I've finally gotten the go-ahead to get CruiseControl running on our application. I was looking around for documentation and cool hacks when I found out that you can use lava lamps to signal build success or failure. Keep in mind that in some dark corners of the world, deployment is still a 15-step manual procedure, so having a cool visible cue seemed real cool.

I realize this is old news, but I hadn't seen this before, so I'm still in awe. Lavalamps! How cool is that? The hack is based on the X10 firecracker kit. It's basically a widget that hooks up to your serial port (yeah, who has those any more?), and then a few more widgets that acts like power sockets with wireless receivers. Despite the horrible look and feel I've spent too much time on X10's site the last few days.

I thought my biggest issue was deciding between the serial (proven, has drivers that work) or USB (works with my Mac, harder to get working, more expensive) interfaces, when I find out about the Orb. Man! This thing is sweet. Apparently that's what Gladys' company uses. There's even a wireless rabbit you can hook up to signal your build status. The bad part is that these things are all more than what my budget for this is, so I'm going to have to stick with the X10 kit (it's much cheaper on EBay, btw).

I'm working on getting CruiseControl working now, so as soon as I decide how I want daily, tagged builds, I just need to find some lights. I was thinking that red and green Christmas lights might be a cheap and still relatively cool way to display build status.

Really, in the end all that matters is that I get the automated builds going. Now, if I could only find a good way of doing what Capistrano does for Rails...

I found a blog post this morning about why Ruby on Rails will not become mainstream.

I'm not sure I agree with all the points, but I do think that not having a good IDE is a problem. At least for me, coming from the Java side, I miss being able to debug in my editor, and to use auto-complete when I'm using slightly unfamiliar parts of the API.

Sure, TextMate is a fine product, and I'm still very excited about Ruby on Rails, but I'm not convinced it will dethrone Java.

I'm trying to be less enthusiastic about Rails, but even after a few days it still seems very exciting.

The last couple of days I've spent a good amount of time cleaning up Hibernate XDoclet tags and removing redundant method implementations, and a lot of that work wouldn't be necessary if Java frameworks used "configuration by convention."

Sure, projects like AppFuse make getting a Java app running almos as easy as Rails, but it's just not the same.