Building a Dev Box

Although I am the sole developer on most of the software projects I currently work on, I often haven in the back of my mind the steps that another developer would have to go through to contribute to a project. I think this is usually a good consideration as this line of thought forces me to at least try to establish a simple development and test environment, and to try to write clear and easy to work with code. Before a fellow developer even looks at a line of code for the littleware project he or she has to install a series of software packages on his machine to build up a base development environment. Here is a quick rundown of several of the packages I install on a box that I expect to develop on.

• JDK 1.6 build 10 or later
• NetBeans IDE
• Mercurial SCM
• Glassfish J2EE Server
• Postgres RDMS
• Firefox web browser
• On Windows I'd also install AOL Instant Messenger, Google desktop, and Windows Powershell with the community extension pack.

This list is not comprehensive, but it has the big pieces.