Posted by Erwin van der Koogh around lunchtime: November 15th, 2008
About 2 years ago I first heard the term “technical debt” from one of my coworkers. Well, I heard technical depth instead of debt first, which clearly did not help me see why it was such a great term for crappy code and quick and dirty solutions.
Posted by Erik Pragt around lunchtime: November 11th, 2008
Smart code completion has been improved in IntelliJ 8. In the new version of JetBrains’ IDE ‘even smarter’ code completion is added. But first I’ll explain what smart code completion is! Basically, it’s code completion on steroids, which takes the type of the variable into account too which the new value is assigned to. So, if your assigning a value to a variable of type String, smart code completion will only display methods which are compatible with a String type, and filters the list of methods accordingly. It does even a lot more than this, which you can read about here
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Posted by Balaji D Loganathan in the early evening: November 9th, 2008
Posted by Erik Pragt in the late afternoon: November 9th, 2008
IntelliJ 8: Database Browser
A new feature is added in IntelliJ 8, which is the database browser. This functionality was already available with the help of some plugins, but now it has been integrated in the core of IntelliJ, and has been integrated in the complete IDE. This blog will give you some examples of how to set it up, and how to use it.
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Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the late evening: November 8th, 2008
Flex provides means to create RIA applications in declarative fashion using MXML. Unlike Swing where you need to do the entire coding in Java, Flex hides a lot of complexity behind MXML tags like JSTL/taglibs do for JSPs. In JSP world, view level scripting is done in JavaScript and presentation layer server side code is written in Java which kind of provides a separation between client side code and server side code. If you really want to do some dynamic stuff on JSPs, either you write some Java code inside JSP (not recommended though) or you use/create taglibs to achieve the same effect. In Flex world, it’s all about ActionScript (AS). Irrespective of whether you are writing some scripting or server side code, it’s all AS code which kind of creates a confusing situation in front of a developer. It becomes very difficult to separate the scripting code from server side code. That’s one of the reasons people complain about Flex as it looks like it doesn’t provide a clear separation between scripting code and server side code.
Posted by Erik Pragt in the early morning: November 7th, 2008
Coding is refactoring. What starts with a great idea, might prove incorrect in the future. A simple example is the following code:
public class Address {
private String streetName;
private Integer houseNumber;
// getters and setters
}
Posted by Erik Pragt late at night: November 6th, 2008
IntelliJ 8 provides 7 new refactorings. One new powerful refactoring is the Introduce Parameter Object. The name speaks for itself: it introduces a parameter object! But what does it really do? The refactoring promotes good encapsulation. It encapsulates fields by introducing a new object for them.
Posted by Erik Pragt in the late evening: November 6th, 2008
Today, a new release of IntelliJ 8 has been released! It’s the magic number 8, and could a better name have been taken? IntelliJ 7 was already a very good Java IDE, but version 8 only builds further on this!
New features of the 8 release are (amongst others):
- SQL integration
- Standard Groovy and Grails integration
- Seam integration
- Maven support greatly improved
- 7 (!!) new Java refactorings
- Adobe Flex support
- And many more improvements!
To celebrate this, I will release a series of blogs about some of the new or improved features of IntelliJ 8! So stay tuned!
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh in the wee hours: November 5th, 2008
That is what I would like to find out today. If you ask a group of developers what it is, the only thing they will agree on is that it is important. Managers will tell you they want high-quality software, but only because it is politically correct to do so. They are more than willing, and usually even eager, to trade in this mysterious quality for more functionality or performance when it is needed.
And who can blame them? What is the business case for something you can not even explain?
We know beautiful code when we see it, but how do we write beautiful software? And the even better question, why would we care?
Posted by Maarten Winkels at around evening time: November 3rd, 2008
Today InfoQ has posted my article Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex.
The article describes how the combination of Flex and Grails leads to a highly productive platform for writing JEE applications. It discusses the problems one faces when integrating Flex as client technology and Grails as server technology and details solutions for each of these problems.
The article can be used as a tutorial for writing simple client-server applications with Grails and Flex.