Tim O'Brien O'Reilly Network

FindBugs Session: Notes

Tim O'Brien — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:16:08 PDT

Sitting in the FindBugs session, it’s pretty interesting. The last time I interacted with static analysis it was a product from Parasoft (?) and it wasn’t that compelling. FindBugs looks interesting, simple, and is integrated with Hudson. Everyone seems to be moving to Hudson, Kohsuke has created a very compelling CI server.

Quick Facts

FindBugs Project Page. FindBugs is LGPL, it is integrated with a bunch of different IDEs + Ant + Maven + Hudson. It is used by some very large players including Sun, EBay, and Google.

Notes from the Session

“in anger” is a British term, loosely translated to “using something with seriousness and intent”.
“FindBugz analyzes a program without exectuing it Generally static analysis tools have no idea what your program is supposed to do Instead it looks for violations of reasonable programming practices. If this statement is executed an NPE will occur. Not a replacement for testing, very good at finding that you have code that is not tested.”
“FindBugz is 5-6 years old.” when he started working on FindBugz, people didn’t take static anaysis very seriously, the attitude was “Programmers are smart, smart programmers don’t make dumb mistakes, we have all these good techniques for finding bugs so if there actually are bugs in production code they must be very subtle bugs.” In other words, people didn’t take static analysis very seriously. On the next slide he shows an egregious bug that was released in the JDK. Something like:
```
if (filters == null ) { filters.remove( filter );
}
```
Quote: “I found embarrassing bugs writen by some of the best programmers I know. I found bugs in Joshua Bloch’s code. “
Quote: “.When you start talking about 00,000 lines or a millions lines, the kinds of things I’m talking about become essential. Google, Sun, and Ebay use FindBugs. Google has fixed more than 1000 issues identified by findbugs. Googl has removed more than 80 infinite loops from the Google codebase with Findbugs.”
Quote: “Findbugz is a small open source project. Only 3 people that regularly commit code to it, none of them full time. A lot of the stuff is not well documented. “
Quote: “Hudson is my favorite way to use FindBugz. “
Quote: “One of the [worst] use cases for static analysis is for your pointy haired boss to decide who’s writing good code and whos writing bad code. “
Google Facts:
Over two years, one person year of effort. Reviewed 1663 issues, 804 fixed by developers. Back of hte envelope 5-15 issues reviewed and processed per day per auditor.
Spends a lot of time talking about filtering bugs - what bugs to ignore. His advice was to ignore low priority bugs in a massive code base.
Other cool stuff: Findbugs will keep track of historical bugs. You can track your project’s improvement over time. It keeps track of “Bug Instances” in an XML format.
Swing GUI and Eclipse plugins allow you to annotate results from FindBugs, the annotations are stored in the XML. You can run an analysis and then someone can circle back and say things like “Ignore this bug”, “Judy is going to fix this bug”, etc. You can reconcile bugs against bug history. My impression here is that FindBugs is less a reporting tool and more a tool that lets you act on those reports.
Currently working to store this bug database in an external database

Neil Young at JavaOne

Tim O'Brien — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:52:34 PDT

Participated in a Q+A session after yesterday’s keynote. Sat down with Neil Young, Larry Johnson, some Sun executives, and a small group of reporters including Tim O’Reilly. Young and Johnson struck me as animated and excited about both the archive project and the electric car (more below). Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also covered the Q+A session on ReadWriteWeb. Here are my informal impressions / quotes from the meeting. Read on for quotes and details…

Young’s Keynote Appearance

First, here’s the keynote appearance by Neil Young:

Afterwards, Young went straight to a press room for a small briefing, here’s what he had to say:

On the Music Archive

Young was archiving all of his performances and recordings for 15 years. He’s a self-proclaimed pack rat and he has an instinct to hold on to everything. Larry Johnson, who has been working with Neil Young since Woodstock in ‘69 as a film producer, mentioned that Neil was always keeping track of everything, mentioning that Neil’s archives had “detailed lists down to how much each member of the band was paid on the first tour.” Neil Young on his own collecting and the music archive he amassed, “I only gave the record companies what I wanted them to hear.” The first volume of the archive, Volume 1: 1963-1972, is set to be released this year.

Young talked of the archive and how it shows his own musical progression and development: “The recordings show a major ‘flow’.”…”In the beginning, I talked alot. I was extremely open. I was nervous. I would make a lot of jokes, and then I would sing some ’sad bastard’ songs”. He also commented that the collection shows his muscial progression and “the effects of success”.

Tim O’Reilly asked a question about Young’s digital archive and compared it to the My Life Bits. O’Reilly referred to the 9 patents on model trains, and commented on the link between creativity and art. Neil responded to Tim with (exact quote): “There’s a lot of math in music. It’s emotional math.”

Linc-Volt

While Young was excited about the Archive project, he seemed particularly animated about the Linc-Volt project. The Linc-Volt Hybrid is a modified large-body 2.5-ton, 19.5 foot long, Lincoln Continental Mark IV (in other words, it’s a massive boat, take a look)). Young’s trying to prove that you can modify a car like the Mark IV to achieve greater than 100 MPG, and he’s working with Larry Johnson on a documentary about the effort. click here for more info about the XPrize entry

Neil started talking about the need to change automobiles, the need to do away with roadside refueling. He put forth some solutions, talked about electricity as being the solution. (exact quote) “An interesting goal would be to eliminate roadside refueling”. He connected energy policy to the global power structures that are to blame for war. He talked about the XPrize a bit. He mentioned the zero-emission Air Car in India that uses an engine run by compressed air. On taking risks and exploring alternative energy solutions for cars: (exact Young quote) “People say you are nuts. I’m used to that. I’ve been nuts for a long time.”

O’Reilly asked him how involved he was in the day to day construction of the car: “I’m an overseer/manager, I talk directly to the engineers.”

I asked him if he would make the Linc-Volt designs open source and freely available. His response: “There are creative things we can do with the patents. We can get a patent on something and then at the last moment release it on the internet.”…”We don’t want to get rich off of this car, but we would like to fund future research and development.”

Back to Music

Marshall Kirkpatrick, asked him about Trent Reznor and Radiohead, Neil responded by saying that he doesn’t follow these things. I didn’t get the sense that he was paying attention to either. Young then talked about how his original concept included building a 3D “tumbling musical experience”. He then talked about how he continues to do everything he does in analog. (read Marshall’s take on radiohead/reznor question, it is interesting.)

Young was asked what his advice is for new artists, should new artists use analog. His response was along the lines of, “I can afford to do that. I can afford to pay people to maintain the equipment. I don’t tell people what to do” (exact quote) “I think they should do what they want to do”. Young continued to talk about the recording industry, was pressed by (other reporter) on the recording industry: “I don’t pay attention to the commerce part of records. That part will sort itself out.”

On piracy of this new BlueRay offering. Someone asked a question about piracy, Neil (quickly) interrupted to say: “They are going to do that anyway. People are going to grab it and put it on YouTube.”… “Laws don’t matter in this respect” (exact quote) “We want our name on the best quality”

He then continued to talk of the recording industry, likening them to “Microsoft reselling the same software year after year with more bells and whistles”. Young mentioned that companies like Microsoft need to change the way they do business to compete with innovation from companies like Salesforce (yes, Neil Young said something about Salesforce.)

Young on listening to music: “I don’t listen to music. I don’t like to crowd myself”…. “I’ll listen to MP3s coming through the air”… “Putting on headphones and listening to an MP3 is like hell” .. “I can listen to music coming through the air, the air has a chance to do something to it”

Impression: Neil Young is a Geek

It’s tough to overestimate how involved Larry Johnson has been in Neil Young’s entire career. From Woodstock in ‘69, to Fillmore East in ‘70, to co-producing Young’s 2006 anti-war protest album Living with War, Johnson has been working with Young for almost four decades. Neil is a legendary musician, and Johnson is a legendary film producer. It is clear that Larry saw something innovative in the capabilities of the Blu-ray format that would allow them to realize this vision of a highly interactive music archive. I definitely didn’t get the sense that they were coerced into this by Sun, Johnson was genuinely excited about the format. You might find this hard to believe, but I get the sense that Neil Young is a genuine geek (in a good way).

I sat in a room with a rock star who was animated about social issues, tinkering with technology, and was very aware of the industry. Implicit in the conversation that was happening was a realization that the music industry is in a period of transition triggered by technological advances. Keynotes don’t give a people a chance to communicate, the Neil Young I saw in this meeting, was a Neil Young who was geeking out on automotive technology and tinkering with cars. Sure, he might not be using NetBeans, but he did strike me as a Jeffersonian polymath / Renaissance man (did you know he has 9 patents?). When Tim O’Reilly introduced himself to Neil Young he perked up and said “cool”, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neil Young is a Make subscriber.

Trivia: Neil’s middle name is Percival.

JavaOne Impressions from Tuesday: Busy

Tim O'Brien — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:34:57 PDT

My entries are a day behind. I’m not a reporter, I’m a blogger, and I think it is more important to spend time talking to people than it is to work to some deadline in the press room. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on this year, a general sense that Java has it’s mojo back. Here are some quick observations (a larger piece on Neil Young is in review at the moment):

Bob Lee has a lot of energy, you can just tell when you meet him. People are flocking to the Google booth to hear him speak of Guice. Go to his BoF tonight, whether you use Guice or not, he’s an interesting dude.
The video codec is welcome to many. This neutralizes hundreds of negative blog posts from me about video on the Java platform.
Rod Johnson is impressed with Glassfish. He’s as surprised that he said this as you are. Rod talked to me about the new application platform Springsource released, the Covalent acquisition, and business in general. In short, the app platform is all about OSGi, the acquisition with Covalent gives them really deep coverage of both Tomcat and HTTPd, and there’s more to come.
Schwartz is definitely “on message” this year. He does seem a little weary, no? Maybe that’s just me seeing the conference through the lens of the 4 cent per share loss. When asked in a press conference if he would comment on the upcoming layoffs he answered with, “I’m here to talk about JavaOne”. Everybody seems to think he’ll be gone in a year, I disagree. I think the MySQL acquisition and the down market provide a good cover for him to restructure without looking like a bad guy. I think he’s a developer’s CEO, and I shudder to think of a Sun run by some soulless suit. Keep the blogging long-hair, everybody likes him.
The Maven dudes wants to hear your feedback positive or negative. Seek them out - twitter BrianEFox. Seek out Jason van Zyl, he wants to talk to you about Maven, Nexus, all that stuff.
Met Raible for the first time in person, everyone was enjoying themselves at Zebulon last night. It is scary to be in the same room as all these open source people. From what I see, everybody gets along well. Everyone was making fun of my Mr. Maven sweatshirt (I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up on someone’s blog.)
Bruce Snyder and I talked about writing, he’s writing his current book (Manning) in DocBook, says I helped him make the decision. I’ll have to pre-emptively apologize, DocBook is a PITA, but, at the same time, I love it. Bruce is really committed to writing, we need more people like Bruce. We need more people to write.
I found myself in a small group briefing with Neil Young yesterday, he’s an impressive (legendary) dude. A real geek, I kid you not. And, he’s focused on stuff like the environment and peace. Good choice for the keynote. I spoke to him and he spoke back to me, that’s when I realize I was speaking directly to Neil Young in a small group. Crazy, that dude’s famous.
Geertjan is everywhere. Turn a corner, Geertjan! Open up a door, Geertjan! Netbeans is impressing some skeptics. Schwartz singled out Tor and Geertjan as great bloggers in response to a question (from me).
Sun employees, business is pretty good out there. Every business owner I talk to at JavaOne thinks they’ll have a job for you. That’s the sense I get.
I skipped the scripting stuff, not because I didn’t want to go, but because I have to go talk to some OpenLazslo dude. Ooops, I’m late. I’m always late, I’m a jerk.

JavaOne => J1 | Nutter on JVM | Groovy Beta "Bytecode Diet"

Tim O'Brien — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:57:55 PDT

If you are following JavaOne on Twitter, you should “track javaone”. If you haven’t already signed up, you should read Bob Lee’s Going to JavaOne? Sign up for Twitter blog entry from two days ago. People were using Twitter last year a bit, but this year is the year Twitter is going to change the JavaOne experience for attendees that are using it. In fact, it looks like Charles Nutter has already changed the name of JavaOne on twitter:

Not only is that easier to type and write, but it’s the new name we’ve all been looking for. He goes on to write a piece about how Groovy and JRuby attained massive performance improvements…

Nutter On How the JVM was made for Dynamic Languages, and how it only gets better in the future…

Charles’ post from yesterday is getting loads of attention, it was #5 on Reddit homepage this morning… The Power of the JVM.

… JRuby’s performance regularly exceeded Groovy’s, even though several Ruby features require us, for example, to allocate a synthetic call frame for *every* Ruby method invocation and most block invocations. And JRuby had only received serious work for about 1.5 years. The problem was not that Groovy was an inherently slow language…the problem was the huge amount of code that calls had to pass through to reach their target…

He talks of the recent 2x to 5x speed improvement in Groovy in the context of call path optimization in JRuby. He references Guillaume Laforge’s Groovy 1.6-beta-1 release announcement.

Nutter goes on to talk about how the JVM is best suited for Dynamic languages because it has a JIT and a VM that is always watching for optimizations (he points out that the most important part is that it can deoptimize). Another quote from Nutter:

…The JVM’s ability to deoptimize and return to interpretation gives it room to be optimistic…room to make ambitious guesses and gracefully fall back to a safe state, to try again later.

He continues to paint a picture of a bright future thanks to John Rose’s work on JSR-292 “invokedynamic”. In a related note, if you are interested in Nutter’s post, you’ll be interested in John Rose’s blog post n Method Handles, here’s a great ending that relates to Nutter’s post:

But the point is not calling or using these things from Java; the point is using them, down near the metal, to assemble the next 700 witty and winsome programming languages.

Groovy’s Been on a Bytecode Diet

This is the weekend before J1, so everyone tends to make releases. Groovy, releases 1.6-beta-1. Looks like they focused on performance over features. Read Laforge’s announcement he talks of the performance improvements, multiple assignments, and AST transformations.

Beyond delivering stable and quality releases, our main focus over the past 10 months has clearly been on performance.
Between Groovy 1.0 and 1.5.1, on these same tests, we had already gained up to 80% speed improvements, and even between “dot releases” (1.5.1 and 1.5.6) we gained again up to 40% more. However, it’s really in the development branch that we’ve integrated advanced call site caching techniques and bytecode diets in the runtime to get the 150-460% speed improvements mentioned above.

git with git/svn lives/preemptive adobe(?)

Tim O'Brien — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:24:45 PDT

Assaf Arkin (of Buildr) writes a very long, very informative piece about Git in Git Forking for Fun and Profit.

Apache built a great infrastructure around SVN, lots of sweat and tears went into making it happen, and at first I felt like we’re circumventing all of that. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that Git is just more social than SVN, and that’s exactly what Apache is about.

Read more at Assaf’s Labnotes blog… Assaf discusses how Git specifically changes the dynamics of open source development, how it makes it easier for non-committers to contribute. He continues:

Come to think of it, just giving all that power to contribute to developers who are not yet committers is a killer feature, and why I’m writing this piece to begin with.

Subversion Remains Relevant

Don’t think this means that Subversion is going anywhere soon. B. C. Sussman comments on Subversion’s Future? in iBanjo. He writes:

I have to say, after using Mercurial for a bit, I think distributed version control is pretty neat stuff. As Subversion tests a final release candidate for 1.5 (which features limited merge-tracking abilities), there’s a bit of angst going on in the Subversion developer community about what exactly the future of Subversion is. Mercurial and Git are everywhere, getting more popular all the time (certainly among the 20% trailblazers). What role does Subversion — a “best of breed” centralized version control system — have in a world where everyone is slowly moving to decentralized systems?…. (Read more)

Hint: It plays a pretty big role.

Adobe Preemptive Announcement? (Or, When am I going to be able to play an $%#$ing FLV from an Applet?)

Open Screen Project is important. We’ll see how it hits people… long story short, you couldn’t read the swf and flv specs before this project unless you agreed not to build a player. This likely doesn’t address Sun’s objections to the video format, but it could free up others to build (legal) support for FLV into JMF. Better yet, maybe someone would implement a Flash player in Java….. (OK. That’s insane. But, think about it. No really, think about it. Now stop thinking about it.)

Methinks, that Adobe is sensing some announcement at JavaOne. I’m going to guess it has something to do with the JDK on a mobile device, probably Google Android. From what I hear people are busily trying to get some cool applications to run on an Android phone. We’ll see what happens. The idea is that Sun + Google might be the only combination innovative enough to take on Apple’s iPhone. If Adobe frees up the SWF and FLV spec then what’s stopping people from implementing players on both the iPhone and the Android. (Again, I know, crazy idea.) In other words, Adobe might actually be able to get to the elusive “Write Once, Run Everywhere” by way of the Open Screen Project. We’ll see. It certainly moves the bar just a little higher right as the Sun people are banging away at JavaFx.

Hank Williams has some analysis on his blog Adobe Takes Gloves Off in Mobile World:

This is a direct shot across the bow of both Apple with the iPhone and Google with Android. Adobe has far more 3rd party developers than Apple does with Mac OS/iPhone or Google does with Android, and if they can make it totally seamless to develop for desktop or mobile, it will radically change the dynamics of the business. Presumably Adobe will be able to port this next version of Flash to the iPhone as well, though the politics of that will be interesting given Steve Jobs’ antipathy for Flash.

From a business perspective, Adobe seems to have everyone onboard that matters including Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, and lots of others. Now that Flash is free and presumably easy to embed, it instantly becomes the mobile and embedded software platform to beat.

License Fake-out hits ExtJS and Java Service Wrapper: Communities Alienated

Tim O'Brien — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:08:32 PDT

In Choosing an OSS License and the Ext-JS saga, Graeme Rocher (of Groovy on Grails fame) reacts to the recent ExtJS switch from LGPL to GPL. Here’s a quote:

What they have effectively done is built up a community, taking full advantage of the open source model by accepting user contributions and patches and then turned around and kicked their own community up the backside. It is projects like Ext-JS that give open source a bad name. How can a company have faith in open source if the people behind it can’t even decide how to license the thing?

In related news, the Java Service Wrapper did something similar. Jason Van Zyl commented on the JSW license switch on the Maven developer’s list:

Project[s] that start using a commercially liberal license and then switch[ licenses] long into the life of a project is wrong. If you want to do the GPL/commercial thing then say so from the start. [There is] nothing wrong with this model, but for libraries and tools using a commercially liberal license is the best way to get community adoption and then to flip the license I find a little unsavory.

Anyone interested in forking it and maintaining the version that was not GPL?

Update (5:45 PM Central): A little madness thinks ExtJS has discovered step 2 of the elusive Slashdot business model:

The model works because step 1 allows you to build a community around the more liberal LGPL license. In particular, as the LGPL is commercial-friendly, the community will include many people building commercial applications. Once the community is suckered in and committed, the license is changed, leaving them high and dry. Well, not quite: they can continue to use new versions of the library by buying a commercial license. Hence the profit!

Update (6:17 PM Central): More from Stephans Blog

Quick Wicket Pointers: Netbeans, AJAX, and a Book

Tim O'Brien — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:46:31 PDT

By way of Geertjan’s Blog, apparently Netbeans supports Wicket development.

Also, from Geertjan is an interview with Jonathon Locke, Eelco Hillenius, and Igor Vaynberg. Read this if you are interested in learning about how Wicket does Ajax.

In other news, Martjin Dashorst’s Wicket in Action (Manning) is available. Should be printed in June.

Help Lessig Tag Congress

Tim O'Brien — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:39:37 PDT

Sorry, it isn’t entirely Ruby related… it is Python Django to be specific, but it is a message aimed at you (”the wiki-worker types”) from Lawrence Lessig recruiting people to tag members of Congress at Change-Congress.org:

Today we’re launching the second stage of our project. We’re asking wiki-worker-types (and that includes you) to help us tag all candidates and Members of Congress, by tracking for each whether they support the planks of reform in the Change Congress movement or not. We’ve built a set of tools that you can use to document — for each plank of reform — whether a candidate supports that plank or not. After that information is verified by a volunteer administrator, we’ll add it to a map of reform that we’re building. After we’re done, we’ll have a picture of the level of support for fundamental reform of Congress. And with that map, we’ll launch stage 3 of our project — raising money to support candidates who support reform

Django has the edge in the civic-Web20-computing space as Holovaty’s Django was always more focused on the public square from the beginning. You would think Rails would be a no brainer for this, but in my brief encounter with the world of political web sites, many of the people I was talking to thought that PHP was king (ick). (In related news, this is the best online book interface I’ve seen yet.)

Surprising Contender: NetBeans as a Ruby+MySQL IDE

Tim O'Brien — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:35:33 PDT

I’m sure you don’t believe it, doesn’t seem like NetBeans is going to take the Ruby developer world by storm, but Sun seems to be pouring money into Ruby support. I’m skeptical that the Ruby community is going to embrace Netbeans, but in this entry, I present some hints that NetBeans may be well on its way to becoming the Ruby IDE of choice. The idea that an IDE traditionally associated with Java development is going to take the Ruby world by storm might seem insane at first glance, but read on…

Sun is focused on developer market share…

…nothing else. Pouring money into Ruby support and acquiring MySQL for a cool billion play into this perfectly. While everyone has been moaning about the Death of Java for years, it remains the biggest draw on Safari, and the biggest book market. Ruby has the fastest growing community. My conspiracy theory is that the MySQL acquisition coupled with the HUGE Netbeans focus means that Sun is after you. Sun sees Ruby as having the energy, they want to channel your mojo. (JavaOne should really be renamed at this point, I predict they are going to talk about Ruby almost as much as Java this year.)

Which brings me to NetBeans…

Kovacs Pitches a Curveball

Sun relentlessly pushes NetBeans at every conference, to the point where every time I’m in a Sun presentation I expect someone to relate it back to The Great IDE: NetBeans. Almost every time I talk to some Sun PR operative they are talking to me about NetBeans. I’ve met some people that use NetBeans, but most tend to use either Eclipse or IntelliJ. Michael Kovacs writes about his past and present view of NetBeans over on his blog in “So long TextMate?… Hello NetBeans? Really? Yeah, really.”

Michael Kovacs: I’ll admit it, I’m one of many folks that used to treat NetBeans as a whipping boy. Questioning why Sun would bother dumping money into the horse that so obviously lost the race to Eclipse and IntelliJ to win the hearts and minds of Java developers around the world.

He continues:

Michael Kovacs: I grabbed a nightly build of 6.1 and installed it. Right away I noticed that they made a special build for ruby where they’ve stripped it down to where it is focused on supporting ruby and rails apps. They added a theme that looks similar to textmate to make me feel more at home. Many keybindings are similar to Textmate (though not all but they are easily configurable). You can easily debug your rails apps with the graphical debugger. The generators work. Code completion works okay at times. API docs are easily visible inline during code completion. Navigating around the project is now easy where before that was the single biggest outage that kept me from even considering it. You can easily jump to type definitions. Simple refactoring is supported…..

Right, last time I installed Netbeans was just after last year’s JavaOne, and I came away with the idea that it was weighty, not very agile. I forget how big the download was, but it was more than Eclipse. I’m convinced there are some great things about the tool, and that it has come a long way, but I’m still somewhat incredulous. Although, Kovacs is no Sun fanboy, so his post got my attention.

So, let’s just assume that Kovacs is right and NetBeans is a real contender now… enter MySQL..

James Hints at NetBeans 6.5: MySQL Integration

You’ll probably warm up to NetBeans 6.5 once it becomes MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Analyzer. James from Sun Discusses MySQL Support in NetBeans 6.5 and you can see list of planned database features for NetBeans 6.5. Maybe we’ll see the existing MySQL tools integrated in situ… from the wiki:

…MySQL WorkBench will solve this if we can integrate with it in some way…

Now that might give me a real reason to start using the tool. If Sun really wanted to be draconian about it they would absorb MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser into NetBeans and make NetBeans the only way to run the tools. Now, if NetBeans became the supported way to manage MySQL, many Rails programmers would find themselves with an installation of NetBeans (with integrated MySQL Administrator, Query Browser, and Workbench). Then they can start attracting you to NetBeans Ruby support….. then after that they start to convince you to start deploying applications using JRuby…. then they dangle something like Glassfish integration in front of you and XA transactions (because everyone ends up needing them).

I’m still skeptical, but I’m going to RubyOne….. err… JavaOne with open eyes. If Kovacs is right, then NetBeans might just turn into the logical choice.

Netbeans Rails Support

If you are interested in seeing what Netbeans has to offer wrt Rails, take a look at Tor Norbye’s blog.

(Time to stop) Stubbornly Clinging to Emacs

I still use Emacs for Ruby programming, everytime I’ve tried to get into something like Aptana, I’ve been frustrated by this or that. Eclipse can become a bloated hog very quickly, and Aptana’s array of confusingly named products doesn’t help. I often wish that I could go back in time and dissuade the Aptana guys from contacting the RadRails project, Aptana tries to do too much IMO - All I want is a Ruby IDE, and I get some sort of crazy “Ajax server” called Jaxer.

Although I use Eclipse with success in other languages, I’ve never seen the need for an IDE in Ruby. I said the same thing about Java up until 2002 when it became abundantly clear that the language complexity was forcing me to adopt an IDE. That hasn’t happened to me yet with Ruby. Even with greater MySQL integration, I’m still not convinced I would make the jump to an IDE for Rails. It is likely time to revisit Netbeans.

Subscribe to Tim’s O’Reilly Network Feed