After a discussion with a colleague at a coffee break this morning, I decided to try out Google App Engine. The getting started guide is a great place to start. It gives you a great walk-through setting up the development environment and creating a sample application. Since I am no big fan of Eclipse, I installed the Google App Engine Plugin for NetBeans. After resolving a small issue regarding path settings (see solution here), it was up and running perfectly.

Next steps will be to figure out what changes that has to be made to my existing applications to be able to deploy them on app engine. Probably the server side of YouOweMe will be the first candidate. Or maybe the KanbanFX server. I haven’t decided yet…

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At first, I was skeptical to the whole idea thinking it would generate an overload of noise for a couple of weeks until dying slowly like most initiatives to share knowledge within companies. But after having thought about it, I really hope that will not happen. It is actually a brilliant way of building a knowledge base within the company. Everyone who has tried to establish some form of knowledge exchange know how hard it is to get people to contribute.

But by “hiding” it behind some familiar technology like twitter, people actually contribute without knowing it. If you think about it, only the things people are interested in will be posted and discussed in such a forum. People will only put energy in discussions they have strong feelings for. The things most people have feelings for are probably pretty relevant things for your organization. And it is by default fully searchable with the newest items most visible.

So with my limited experience of yammer (have used it two days), I will conclude that it is actually a good thing. Now we just have to hope that it does not die a silent death when it is not that new-and-cool anymore…

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Even though we are out there exposing ourselves on facebook, blogs and twitter, we are not comfortable sitting next to someone that are watching us typing while we are writing our blog post or tweet. As soon as we hit the submit button everything changes. Now we actually want people to read the stuff. That is why I call this

our irrational fear of real-time exposure

Exposure is fine, which the popularity of facebook and twitter are evidence of, as long as we are not caught doing it. Feel free to tweet, blog or comment on this

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Well, over to what this post is all about: the conference. The keynote was held by Scott Hanselman. He gave an excellent talk about effectiveness and efficiency. Some really good stuff to bring back from that speech. Will try to list some of the techniques and tools he mentioned in a later blog post.

I will also summarize the rest of the sessions I attended today very soon here…

Great conference!

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Ola Bini presented the folding language Ioke. I will definitely download this and play around with it. Hopefully, I can use it in some presentation in near future. Really cool and fun!

The next presentation I attended was Neal Ford’s presentation about XP in practice. Nothing really new there, but more a confirmation that what I feel we are doing right applies to others as well. And, more valuable, tips and techniques for how to improve on what we are doing not so right. At last a kind of nerdy way of looking at pair programming:

• 100 eyes
• 010 brains
• 001 mind

Continuing on the agile track, Dan North gave an excellent talk about our obsession with efficiency. The three key points to remember from his talk is:

• You get what you measure
• Not all vendors are bad guys
• Efficiency isn’t effective

Back to the languages track, I attended a talk by Neal Ford where he compared Groovy and JRuby. It gave me a pretty good comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of both languages.

The only session on the Java track was a disappointment. The only thing I really got from this presentation was that I could charge my netbook’s batteries. Still running OpenSolaris on it, by the way, and is generally happy with it!

Last technical presentation today was about clojure. Kind of tough thing to jump into this late in the afternoon, but the presenter, Stuart Halloway, did a great job.

In the afternoon keynote, Cameron Purdy did a comparison of Java and C++.

Overall experience from the first day of the conference is good. It is impressive that they have gathered so many international speakers. If I should pick on something, it has to be that the opening of the conference would benefit from being a little more flashy. Maybe have the opener learn his speech and practice on the English pronunciation…?

And now, it is time for mingle and beer!

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I have been giving it a try and is actually pretty satisfied with it. Even though I am not as familiar with all the shortcuts as I am with NetBeans, it feels comfortable. It does not differ that much. The only problem I have encountered with the default setup is the shortcut for comment/uncomment code (Shift+/). But this is mainly because I am using Swedish or Norwegian keyboard setup where the / is entered by hitting Shift+7. This was easily fixed by adding Ctrl+Shift+7 as a shortcut combination.

I could not find a live template for test methods, but it was easy to create a new one. Here is a simple example:

public void test$NAME$(){
   $END$
}

I am not sure if I like the way multiple projects are handled. If you work with multiple projects in IDEA, each project is opened in a separate frame. In NetBeans you can choose to have multiple projects open in the same workspace and/or group them in project groups. It is probably just a matter of habits, but I like the flexibility to be able to decide that myself and not be forced to open every new project in a new frame.

To conclude, I really like IDEA Community Edition, an will most probably choose use it when I am working on a project where I am in no direct need of Java EE support in the IDE. Otherwise, NetBeans is still my favorite IDE. Eclipse is still out of the question as long as Maven is involved.

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If you have been reading this blog, you probably know that I am quite a big fan of NetBeans and have written quite a few comments about the areas it excels over Eclipse. I have not really tried IntelliJ IDEA yet, but now the Community Edition has been downloaded and installed. JetBrains has provided a detailed comparison between the Community and Ultimate edition.

First Impression
The first impression is that it is fast. The startup time is significantly faster than NetBeans. The editor is responsive, shortcuts and refactorings just as you expect them to be. It sure is ugly, menus and dialogs looks like some left over AWT student project hack from the 90’s, but who cares. After all we are here to code, not to enjoy the view.

Maven
The next test is to open one of my existing multi-module maven projects. Just as with NetBeans, it is just to select the root pom.xml file and open it. All sub-modules and dependencies are resolved just as expected. It scatters a lot of .ipr, .iwl and .iml files all over the place, but I can live with that as long as it updates them with changes from the pom.xml files.

When I check the Module Settings, it seems like the compiler output is set to /classes and not /target as normally by the maven convention. But when i build the project, it uses the maven configuration and puts the compiled classes under target. Why? Well, as long as it works it is okay with me…

Web and Enterprise
As the comparison table shows, there is no support for any web, mobile or enterprise frameworks in the Community edition. Nor are there support for application servers. You would have to buy the Ultimate edition for this. Fair enough, they have to make money somewhere.

Conclusion
The Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA is the perfect choice if you are building a simple java application. It lacks support for development using web, mobile or enterprise technologies. If you want an IDE that is comparable to for example Eclipse Gallileo or NetBeans you would have to go for the Ultimate Edition. In my view NetBeans is the better choice.

Disclaimer: I  have only scratched the surface here and will continue explore the Community Edition. My opinions may change as I go…

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My intentions are to use this blog for subjects that cannot easily be said in 140 characters and twitter for the short, more daily stuff…

Well, so what has happened since last time. Since I have solely been using NetBeans the last couple of years for Java development, I decided to give Eclipse Gallileo a chance. It took me an hour of frustration to conclude that it still sucks for Maven based projects. Why it should be so hard is beyond my comprehension! In NetBeans, you just choose open project, selects the pom.xml file and everything is fine. Dependencies are resolved as they are defined in Maven, no stupid .classpath, .project and .settings rubbish created that makes Eclipse to totally hick-up if a dependency is changed.

Apart from my unsuccessful flirt with Eclipse, I have continued development of KanbanFX. It has been converted to a maven project and besided the information on Kenai, I have created a page for it here where you can try it out. Kanban is increasing in popularity, @henrikkniberg had 300 people on his Kanban vs Scrum session at JAOO this week.

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I have not been able to find any tool fulfilling this need, so I decided to create on myself. Thereby, KanbanFX was born!

KanbanFX is a JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board. Source code and a very limited demo version is available on Kenai:

http://kenai.com/projects/kanbanfx.

Please join the project if you want to contribute. I am pretty sure that I will need help with at least the graphical elements when we get to that…

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In short, Kanban is the Less-is-more cousin of Scrum.
Kanban prescribes only three constraints:

• Visualize the workflow
• Limit WIP (Work In Progress)
• Measure the lead time

The rest is up to you. Kanban does not exclude Scrum or vice versa. Read the article, inspect and adapt and find what is best for you and your organization.

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