Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale
From: Rhino (rhino1_at_NOSPAM.sympatico.ca)
Date: 02/24/05
- Next message: Gordon Beaton: "Re: Problem loading JNI library"
- Previous message: SPG: "Re: Line intersection detection...."
- In reply to: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Next in thread: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Reply: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:52:33 -0500
<dexter@uwm.edu> wrote in message
news:1109211843.025497.259020@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Thanks for the input. Valid points all.
>
> My motivation comes from two related drives: 1) better productivity,
> and 2) starting to do things in a "more standard" way. The rationale
> for (2) being that it's likely that folks in the open source community
> have thought *way* harder about certain standard problems and their
> solutions often take into account many of the gotchas that I'd miss.
>
> As to the "method of learning" thought -- I'm open. Reference manuals,
> tutorials, whatever. Ideally there'd be a super-experienced,
> super-bright coworker (Yoda) to tutor me personally, but alas...
>
I sense one other qualification that Yoda would have to satisfy: free. ;-)
Otherwise, you could hire someone to tutor you. I assume that is not an
option for you.
> The crux of the questioning was more looking for folks to say "here's
> the minimal set of things ya gotta learn to do what you wish and here's
> where you can learn 'em" I realize that my rather shotgun approach in
> the first posting leaves open to question what it is that I wish to do
> -- but that's sort of the point. The technologies seem to be
> far-reaching, scattered, and all inter-related.
>
> My progression went something like
> - hey, Eclipse seems like it might be helpful
> - lookee here, it'll even (maybe) make GUI development a bit easier
> - golly I've never done "proper" versioning, that might be handy..
>
I think Eclipse is great. I started out writing Java code with nothing but
an editor (Programmer's File Editor) and a command line. I'm happy to say
that I can still work that way but I find it more productive to use an IDE.
I used VisualAge Java for a while but found that its Java support was always
2 versions behind the version of Java I wanted to run. For example, when I
wanted to run Java 1.3, VAJ was only supporting Java 1.1.8 with 1.3 support
not expected for months. When I finally got fed up with that, I started
looking around and discovered Eclipse, which didn't have that problem. After
a few hours fooling around trying to figure out how to do basic stuff with
it, I found that I could develop more quickly. If I try to develop with a
basic editor again, I immediately miss the colour-coding of my code and the
quick refactoring (renaming) that I can do in Eclipse to name only the first
of several benefits that Eclipse gives. But I'm not suggesting that Eclipse
is the only good IDE out there. I used JBuilder on a project once and found
it pretty decent. I've heard a lot of good things said about NetBeans,
though I've never used it.
I think you probably should get an IDE but you should probably not lock onto
Eclipse before the fact. Give it a try with a simple project and see if the
benefits are worth the effort of learning Eclipse. If they aren't, try some
of the other IDEs until you find one you like. You could conceivably find
that you prefer vi and your command line, although I'd be suprised if that
was the case.
> Then, more to the point:
> - hey, this JDBC/relational database thing is mostly tedious work that
> could be automated.
> - hey, this JDBC/relational database thing keeps biting me with
> subtleties that take forever to figure out.
I have to admit I'm curious about your JDBC hassles. Maybe it's because I'm
a database guy but I've never found JDBC tedious or troublesome at all. I
was already fluent in SQL when I read a Java/DB2 course (so that I could
teach it a few weeks later!!) and found that the examples and labs on the
course were straightforward enough to get the job done pretty painlessly. A
couple of weeks to reread the lecture notes a couple of times and doing the
course labs a couple of times each and I was pretty functional with JDBC.
In my experience, once I had examples of the major things you do with a
database, I just used those examples as templates for later projects. For
example, once I'd written the code that would connect to the database and
login, I just used pretty much the same code each time. Ditto with executing
a SELECT and processing the result set or executing an INSERT and verifying
that it had worked. And so on.
What problems are you having?
I can't say whether Hibernate would solve your problems but I might be able
to suggest some kind of solution....
> - there's a thing called Hibernate (or JDO, or J2EE CMP, or....) that
> takes care of some of this.
> - wow, there's even a Hibernate plug-in (several actually) that
> integrates it to my new-found development environment (Eclipse).
> Wonder how? Wonder which one to use?
> - To use this one (Hibernate Synchronizer), I gotta either *still* do
> the hard database mapping or I gotta learn/use XDoclet.
>
> Basically *every* reference one finds down the open-source technology
> path points to five other references. I'd really like someone to say
> "go get these three packages and read these three reference manuals --
> forget about those others"
>
> So, any takers?
>
> thanx,
>
> -don.
>
- Next message: Gordon Beaton: "Re: Problem loading JNI library"
- Previous message: SPG: "Re: Line intersection detection...."
- In reply to: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Next in thread: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Reply: dexter_at_uwm.edu: "Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Relevant Pages
|
