Brain Freeze

Had a conversation with a coworker the other day about the sorry state of our “intranet” at work. Drupal was set up prior to my having started there and to date nothing has been done to make it worth using. I mentioned that we should just get Confluence in and try it out. I’ve had lots of experience with it at my past employer and it’s fantastic software. The out-of-the-box functionality is great. Also, given that the plug-in architecture makes it very easy to add plug-ins, expanding the capabilities is very easy. Oh, and it isn’t expensive. Not free, but not expensive.

The response I received was basically that well, we had installed Drupal but we haven’t really done much with it. Ummm…yeah. That is exactly my point and why I mentioned Confluence. We don’t have the time to be dinking around with Drupal and, given that we also use JIRA it might be a good idea to give Confluence a look. Yet we keep adding documents and attachments to Drupal with no real guidelines and it’s already a mess.

I’m all for a content repository but if you’re not going to give it some love then it really isn’t any better than a shared network drive. Out of the box Confluence will index Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. so searching for stuff is really easy. Drupal? Nope. Charting of data (which we do all the time via Excel files either emailed or attached to a Drupal page)? Confluence: you bet. With a plug-in it will even chart Excel and CSV data (or SQL queries for that matter). Drupal? Nope. JasperReports (which we are starting to use for a product)? Confluence: yep. Drupal? Nope.

I guess I just don’t get it. In *my* opinion the answer is staring us in the face and its about $2,200 with source code

While messing with a Google Apps setup I have created for my volunteer group I found some interesting things about entering events. Not sure they’re features given the circumstances but they’re interesting nonetheless.

First of all, I selected 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday and entered the term “Kayak Thursday” (no quotes). The calendar application then entered an event for me for the Thursday after the Thursday I had selected.

Then I tried entering “Kayak-Thursday” (again no quotes) and it then scheduled the event for the Thursday prior to the Thursday I had selected.

Putting the title in quotes makes it work the way I want.

I’m not sure this is a feature I really like. When I select a specific day put the event on that day. Don’t try to guess what I want. The behavior with the “-Thursday” was even more odd even though it sort of makes sense. Well, it makes sense now. It certainly didn’t make sense then.

I can understand these things for the quick event feature but not given the context I was in while entering events.

Update: I’m getting quite a few eyes on this posting because of the link from dzone so I wanted to clarify a couple of things. I am referring to the NB project importer that brings Eclipse projects into NetBeans….not the other way around.

Again I want to state that I am not flaming NetBeans I know that people usually have very strong feelings about the environment they use. I am a big fan of the Eclipse/MyEclipse combination. It’s cheap, it offers a lot of functionality, and the support is very good.

I also really like what is happening with NetBeans. 6 is a fantastic release and I wish it fit my workflow better because there are some things that I really like more like the code editor, diff viewer, etc. I think the out of the box experience is far better for NetBeans but I’m already paying for MyEclipse so for me thats where the comparison is most relevant.

——

I saw this link this morning on dzone where the author compares Eclipse and NetBeans with the intention of giving the reader some sort of guidelines as to which environment to choose for development work. Too bad it is just a laundry list of features.

These types of comparisons are really hard to do. You really have to use the products extensively on a real project before you can come to any sort of conclusion and the waters may still be muddy even after that. I’m currently working with both products on a large project and NetBeans still has a way to go before it can compare with Eclipse with MyEclipse (for me). Why?

• The build process for large projects can be excruciatingly slow.
• Is there some reason the Eclipse project importer is rewriting my EJB deployment descriptors as EJB 3.0 when they’re EJB 2.1 beans without asking me if that is what I want to do?
• The CVS support, for those still using CVS, is completely geared toward the branch you’re currently working on. Want to compare some code to another branch? This is easy in Eclipse but apparently not doable in NetBeans.
• No workspaces. To me this feature is critical because it makes working with various branches of code very easy. I can have totally custom settings for the IDE in the different workspaces as I chose. NetBeans comes closer with Project Groups but it still isn’t quite the same thing.
• No exploded deployment options for servers other than Glassfish?

You don’t get to these types of things until you start working more in-depth with two products and really start comparing the workflows. Certainly if this is doable by me it’s doable by a journalist.

Don’t get me wrong though as I still really do like NetBeans. Version 6 has a lot going for it and a for an out of the box experience I think it beats Eclipse since Eclipse really requires a lot of extras to get you to the same level. On that note given the cheap price of MyEclipse it is really hard to beat.

Once again trying out NetBeans and as a long time Eclipse/MyEclipse user I’m pretty frustrated by what seem like limitations but then I’m not sure if it really is a limitation or I’m just not seeing an option somewhere.

In Eclipse and its built-in CVS support you can easily compare a file you’re working on with another branch. This does not seem possible in NetBeans 6 and this is a huge inconvenience. Sure its fine to be able to compare to the server copy of the file in the same branch but when having to work in multiple branches at the same time its nice to be able to see changes between branches. NetBeans only seems to give me the option of switching to another branch or merge from another branch neither of which I want to do. I simply want to see what the differences are between a copy of a file in one branch to another.

Is this possible inside the NetBeans IDE?

Easy solution (even though it still appears the old way is legal code): move the initializer code into a static method. Instead of:

private static Map byDBValue;

private AssetImporterTypeEnum(String dbvalue) {
this.dbValue = dbvalue;

if (AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue == null) {
AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue = new HashMap();
}

AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue.put(dbvalue, this);
}

We have something more along the lines of:

private static Map byDBValue;

private AssetImporterTypeEnum(String dbvalue) {
this.dbValue = dbvalue;

AssetImporterTypeEnum.init(dbvalue,this);
}

private static void init(String dbvalue, AssetImporterTypeEnum i) {
if (AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue == null) {
AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue = new HashMap();
}

AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue.put(dbvalue, i);
}

The errors magically disappear.

Now, I just hope the code works properly….

OK. I’m about to pull my hair out on this one because it’s driving me completely nuts.

Just a bit of background first: I’m giving NetBeans 6 a test run with the current project I’m on to compare it to Eclipse (with the MyEclipse plugins). I keep hearing great things about it and now that I have my projects set up I am noticing a very odd problem that doesn’t happen in Eclipse. We have the following code in one of our enum classes (actually this same pattern is followed in other enums as well):

private static Map byDBValue;

private AssetImporterTypeEnum(String dbvalue) {
this.dbValue = dbvalue;

if (AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue == null) {
AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue = new HashMap();
}

AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue.put(dbvalue, this);
}

The NetBeans editor is flagging the lines that set AssetImporterTypeEnum.byDBValue as an error of type ‘illegal reference to static field from initializer’. From what I can tell this is completely legal code (enums are initialized before any static initializers are run) and the compiler output doesn’t indicate the same error. Actually the compiler output doesn’t indicate any errors. The compile is perfect. I don’t get this error in Eclipse either (neither in the editor or the compiler output)

It’s driving me crazy that I don’t really have errors in the code but the the flag is still showing up both in the editor and in the project tree. Is there some way to change this behavior? Is it a bug (I searched on the bug tracking site for netbeans with no luck)?

Here are some things I’ve found the last couple of days when trying to get JSP debugging working in MyEclispe 6 and Weblogic 9.2:

• You don’t need to modify the weblogic.xml file
  I messed around with the settings here and took them out and debugging still worked.
• There is an undocumented debug tag in the jsp-descriptor section of weblogic.xml. Looking at the docs it is undocumented.
  The file is checked on load to make sure there aren’t invalid tags there. debug isn’t marked as invalid.
• Apparently JSP debug information is controlled by the session-descriptor tag and its parameter debug-enabled.
  I determined this by looking at how the weblogic.xml file was affected by changing the JSP debug flag in the administration console. The documentation really doesn’t shed much light on this.

Now, all of that being said, I don’t have any of those items in my weblogic.xml for my web application and JSP debugging still works.

Was buried in work yesterday and missed this one. Huge news for the Jython community. That along with Tor’s news in the Java Posse podcast that he would start working on another language in NetBeans soon would probably mean Python support coming to NetBeans.

Ruby support really kicks ass in NB. That level of Python support would just be huge.

And people complain that Java has too many web frameworks…. Now we hear of yet another web framework for Ruby. There is Rails, Merb, Camping, Waves, and I assume others. Funny how the Ruby space is becoming so crowded with web frameworks. And here I always thought Rails was perfect but this guy says in the interview that he was running up against limitations of Rails. I could swear Rails was going to solve everything….

I’ve been reading the Hg book today and have found that merging between branches is a much different operation than with CVS or Subversion and much easier. I’m really glad to see this and want to take an even better look at Mercurial by using it a bit. Maybe thats why Tor didn’t talk about it at all in the Posse podcast…there really isn’t much to it