OSCON Day2: Scala

I attended the Scala Summit on day 2 at OSCON.

As well as the Scala introduction classes, there were interesting talks on Akka, Simple Build Tool and Specs….

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Tags: akka, sbt, scala, specs, tools

OSCON Day1: The Productive Programmer

I spent the afternoon of day 1 at OSCON listen to Neal Ford give his “The Productive Programmer” talk and I have to say I loved it. I have heard Neal talk before and he is an excellent speaker: clear, funny, interesting and knowledgeable.

The talk was in 2 parts: Mechanics and Practice.
Below are my notes from the first part of the talk (see here for part2), but you can also get the original slides form here. The talk is based on his book of the same name, The Productive Programmer. Which is similar in theme but not to be confused with the “The Pragmatic Programmer” book.

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Tags: nealford, oscon, productivity, tools

Mylyn

I’ve started using Mylyn. It is a “task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy”. Its objective is to improve productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation.

What does that mean? Basically, it allows you to access your bug tracker from inside Eclipse and then for each task/bug you are working on, it remembers what files you have been using most. The result is that when you switch back to a task you were working on before, the important and most relevant files you were using will be reopened and so at any given time, the files you need are close to hand.

The ‘tasks’, in my case, are defects/enhancements assigned to me in Trac (or specifically DevJaVu), but it has integration with Bugzilla, JIRA and others.

It’s not exactly ground breaking or revolutionary, but it is definitely useful (although the integration/synchronisation with Trac does seem to be a bit flaky, but maybe that is an issue with DevJaVu).
Next up, I would like to start making more use of the change set support.

Tags: eclipse, efficiency, mylyn, tools

NetBeans IDE

I have been playing around with the latest NetBeans IDE (v6.1) recently, mostly as part of some JEE and  Glassfish research I’ve been doing. I am a long time Eclipse user (even back to its predecessor, VisualAge for Java), but I have been pleasantly surprised by NetBeans. It’s UI is definitely a litlle clunkier than Eclipse, but it is fairly intuitive and easy to use and it also seems to useful GUI builder tool that I would like to experiment with more.

See some reviews here and here.

Overall, interesting and I’d like to use it some more, but I still have no plans to stop using Eclipse as my main IDE.

Tags: eclipse, ide, netbeans, tools