Comments on: Open Source Revolution

By: James

James — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 02:55:41 +0000

Fantastic stuff. I had a similar experience as well. Started out with VSS and manual building, no proper use of open source libraries, no issue tracker, no unit testing, no logging.

Life changed completely with intellij idea, netbeans, ant, apache/other libraries, hudson, log4j, junit, trac, ubuntu and so on.

Feeling proud of the great open source community.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:04:52 +0000

Nice trip down memory lane.

My very first Java application was an online timesheet. This was an applet running on JDK 1.0.2 back in 1996.

I agree that early IDE’s got in the way instead of helping. I used to do all my coding with VI until I tried Eclipse 2. Eclipse was the first IDE that actually increased productivity significantly. It’s popularity also gave NetBeans a well deserved kick in the pants. I switched to NetBeans when it reached version 6 and haven’t looked back.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:41:00 +0000

Alex, nice article. Feeling a little nostalgic. I remember in 1996, writing apps with JDK 1.0.2 on OS/2, using their standard text editor. I moved to a company in Arizona that put a Sun workstation on my desktop, and Vim 5.0 introduced me to syntax coloring. In 2003, I left the technical world to pursue another interest, and came back in late 2008. This sort of “Rip Van Winkle” experience has caused me to wish for the good old days even more.

I agree wholeheartedly with you that having so many choices is a good thing. What makes it difficult is that we have so many good alternatives that it’s hard to choose. We spend a lot of time fiddling with each and ultimately end up in a meeting weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each option.

IDEs leave me a little empty. They can do so much, but they fight me the whole way. (I’m cheap, um, frugal, so I’m only familiar with Eclipse and Netbeans. Interestingly, Eclipse was just a pre-release announcement, and Netbeans was a re-branded Forte, which stank horribly, back in 2003). I spend more time tweaking my environment than I should — trying to get it to help me write my code better. I’m probably prejudiced, but it’s really nice to slip back into Vim when I need to get some real work done.

I don’t think you should be sorry to roll your own tools and libraries. They do exactly what you need them to do, nothing else. Your organization has full knowledge of the functionality, and is fully capable of fixing it, or adding features to it. When you factor in the time it takes to learn, configure and integrate a 3rd party tool or library, I don’t know that it saves you all that much time or money, and it might even cost you more in those indirect ways.

By: Alex Miller

Alex Miller — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:41:20 +0000

@Dimitris: I wouldn’t completely agree with you – I think in many cases having these components allows you to focus on the parts of your app that are meaningful to your business instead of the infrastructure. This allows to “develop” on top of higher abstractions and components. But at the same it makes the act of “assembly” much more front and center.

By: Dimitris

Dimitris — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:29:28 +0000

I think it is sad that that phenomenal open source infrastructure explosion has been turning us from “developers” to “assemblers”.