My Development Experiment

My normally negative opinion of IDEs has been greatly improved during the last few months of using Eclipse.   I attended a week of Java training provided by my employer many years ago and I have been used Java off and on since then so my Java skills are weaker than I would like.  But by using Eclipse I am ramping up my Java-ness quickly. Eclipse’s editor does a wonderful job of providing help with selecting available methods for a variable’s class, including the all of the nasty import statements and missing interface mention templates as you use new classes, highlighting errors and suggesting possible solutions. Combine that with Eclipse’s seamless interface to the online Java manuals and tutorials and being rusty in Java is a much easier to deal with.

I chose Java as the language that I am coding this project in for some of these reasons:

• It appears that Java will replace C which replaced COBOL.  All of the millions of lines of C code of the current generation of my employer’s product are now being replaced by even more lines of Java code by the next generation of the product.  So far it seems Java is slower.
• It is portable at a non-source code level.  I could have much easier written this in Perl but when you distribute Perl there is always someone who thinks they can tweak it and breaks it and of course does not have the original code and expects me to support the tweaks.  Compiled (if you want to call a .jar file compiled) code is less tweak-able in that way.  I have yet to determine if I will distribute the Java source or not.
• Coding something in a language you don’t use much is educational and fun (if I keep saying that I might believe it).
• Syntax is cleaner than some other object languages like C++.  But the language was designed so that less talented developers would not be bothered by things like pointers and subscript boundaries.

I think my biggest grief with Java is:

• The number of files you need to have just to implement something relatively small is hugh.  Yea is it nice to have a file to contain a functional point or two, but a requiring separate file for every class.  So far I have just started coding and already I have a half a dozen files with less than a page of code in each.  Eclipse really shines here by making the jumping around much easier and less interruptive to the coding and debugging process.

As part of this project I strived to see how to keep the costs down while maintaining some level of a professional-like development environment.  The choice of computer was made simple by a sale of laptops at my local big-box store.  I am using a Toshiba Satellite M305 that I purchased for less than $500 about a year ago.  It running Vista 64 on a Intel Core2 Duo @ 2GHz with 4Gb RAM and 280Gb Disk.  I installed Eclipse and installed some its plug-ins (which was not very straight forward).  Using Eclipse simplifies tasks like building and version control without installing lots of other software.

I have been writing code for 37+ years now.  Mainly for very large back-end applications for others.  So at the urging of co-workers and my son I am now venturing in the world of smaller applications for myself.  As part of my experiment I am taking the challenge to develop a marketable application using all Open Source code without using any proprietary software.  The first step was to get a domain and install WordPress.  So far so good.