Ghetto Java

I wanted to choose between IDEA and Netbeans but I couldn’t. They both have great features that I need in my life right now. On the IntelliJ IDEA side, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between version 6 and the newest 7.0 milestone release. The only reason I haven’t completely switched is that 7.0 (codenamed Selena) is missing some of the 6.0 plugins that I really need (like SoapUI). 7.0 is a bigger leap forward in features than 5.x to 6.x was. So if you held off on getting 6, you might want to take a look at 7. On the Netbeans side, I’ve been using Netbeans 6.0M10 and I can finally stop b**tching about buggy milestones. Rather than piling on the latest gadgets, this release was all about improving the editor. They seemed to have taken a lot of hints from the way intelliJ IDEA editors work. The refactoring menu and some of the keyboard intentions are now very similar to IDEA. Hell, it’s no secret that Netbeans sees IDEA as the model for editing and refactoring. It’s been said often enough on the Java Posse. I wonder how the Ietbrains INtelliJ team feels about that? IDEA is still the best IDE for code writing but Netbeans 6.0 M10 shows that the gap is closing. Netbeans has always seemed to be the reference implementation of JEE 5 tooling in my opnion. Since they are supported by Sun directly, they get all the hot features first. So as I play with my first Jboss Seam apps, it’s Netbeans that I turn to. So for now I keep both IDEs open on different virtual desktops.
Laterz
GJ

InfoQ has been putting out some cool articles lately and this one slipped under my radar: Using Java to Crack Office 2007

"Without anything more complicated than the native
 JDK itself-in other words, no third-party libraries are
 necessary-a Java application can now read and write any Office 2007
 document, because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than
 ZIP files of XML documents."

I love Maven, I like the way that it tries to define an infrastructure for building modularized applications. I love how it assumes testing is a standard part of the build process. My projects went from needing arial maps to finding config files to a nice standard layout that any many developers can understand. As a bonus, Maven also does semi-automatic dependency management for you. It’s a gift and a curse. The Ant build environment is very good for the “Constant Gardener” type of programmer that love to customize their build process to death. There an ant task for pretty much everything you want to compile, package and deploy in Ant. Maven, a newcomer, is still catching up. When I got my wsdl from Salesforce the other day, all the JAX-WS examples came with ant scripts. Somewhat broken ant scripts, but hackable enough to get working. I kinda wanted to still conform to the maven directory structure of my other projects, so I began fishing for wsimport in the maven2 world. Lo and behold, there was one. The Street was happy, I could keep it real and still “stay maven”. First time I ran the example from here, it simply failed.

Note to CodeHaus:
I often find xml errors in your pom.xml examples.
It’s  <build> </build>  not <build><build>

The build failed because it could not find the jaxws-maven-plugin. This kind of error still surprises me. I can understand if a mainline < dependency/> fails but a plugin? I was kind of assuming that plugins were kept to a higher standard, at least in terms of availability. Who’s running this circus? Now that Web Services in Java is actually getting easy enough for the average blue collar programmer to work with, it’s sad that one still has to fish around for a JAX-WS based maven plugin. Did I already mention that the Ant plugin imported and generated my client classes? In other words, s*** just worked. Hours later, after pouring over mail lists, checking mvnrepository.com, going to java.net where the plugin was last seen, I finally had the plugin. It still didn’t work. Didn’t work on my wsdl or the Amazon WS example on their own site. So I’m ending up doing what I should have done in the first place, stop trying to use a screwdriver on a job where a hammer is a better option.
Refreshing my memory on the jar task as we speak.
Peace
GJ

It seems like every time I turn around, I see another announcement about how Groovy can be used can be used with X framework. Let’s see, we can already make Struts2 actions with ‘em. Can do the same for Seam 2.0 and Wicket. What’s next? inclusion into the next version of Java?