Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Keep up with the bLog!

My list of blogging topics is piling up, but I've been putting off my latest post trying to finish several littleware changes, then a small contract.

Anyway, time to take a break from code, and complain about platforms. It's great that there are so many great tools and frameworks out there to take advantage off - application servers ( glassfish, tomcat, jetty, jboss, geronimo, ... ), distributed SCM (Mercurial, Git ), IDEs (Netbeans, Eclipse), java web component libraries (JSF, MyFaces, RichFaces, PrimeFaces, struts, ...), build tools (ANT, IVY, Maven, Scala SBT, Gradle), databases (MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, ...) ORM ( Eclipselink hibernate, ...), javascript (YUI, JQuery, GWT, Flash, ...), languages (PHP, java, scala, python, ruby, ...), platforms (Spring, JavaEE, Guice, AWS) ... !

It's nice except when it's not nice. It always takes me a while to learn how to use a tool well - the right and wrong way to do things, the corner cases to avoid. So I like to use ant with ivy, glassfish, netbeans, mercurial, YUI, ...; and I'm not going to spend time learning jboss, maven, eclipse, and git unless they have something major to offer me. Of course - other people feel the same way. I can't argue with a project proposal where the client wants to use tomcat, struts, git, maven, and eclipse; because that's what the client is familiar and productive in, and there's no reason for that client to switch to glassfish, jsf, mercurial, ivy, and netbeans. It's a little annoying to spend time learning a new tool that does the same thing as a tool I know how to use, but in a slightly different way - even though I always learn something in the process.

End of rant!

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