My Java Development Environment

05 January 2015

My Java Development Environment

Full disclosure, I’ve only been writing Java for about 2 and a half months. Prior to that I had been doing C for like a year and had done Ruby before that. I had to learn Java because I had the task of building a web service and it had to be built in this language because the infrastructure that the folks I was building it for had dictated so. One of the developers that I was liasing with suggested I get comfortable with the netbeans IDE but this left a bit of a bitter test in my mouth. All my programming life I had learned to avoid IDEs like the plague. I wanted a development environment that gave me the freedom to use whatever development tool I was comfortable with and not have some bundle forced on me. Also IDEs tend to hide a lot of stuff from me and they are bloody resource hogs. You see I don’t develop on a 16G RAM box so I tend to be nervous about anything that wastes my precious memory. Nevertheless, I gave netbeans a chance and tried to stay as open minded as I could but that relationship wasn’t going to get anywhere. So I decided to do it the hardway like I always do whenever am learning a new language. I look at the various aspects of development in the selected language. These aspects are always different depending on the way the programming language was designed. For Java I decided my development phases would be editing, compiling, testing, packaging and of course keeping the projects under version control management. What follows is a specification of the choices I’ve decided to work with so far and possibly the reasons why. These choices are a result of my current stage in developing in Java and will most definitely change in the future as I learn more. I also must add that every time am learning a new language I look at the available open source projects and see the conventions that the community likes to use, Github and Bitbucket make this litle exercise super trivial. I do a lot of community investigation before I even write the first hello world. My choices have further been guided by this investigation.

Editor

I started with vim. I had javac.vim turned off since it was constantly whining that it couldn’t resolve my imports because of my classpath setting. Vim was good but I needed to create a visual difference between my C and Ruby code editors so I’ve since switched to sublime for my Java development and I left vim for the other languages that I prefer to use it for. So for now my editor of choice, for Java is Sublime. In the no-so-far future I plan to switch to Intellij for the simple fact that it’s a beautiful, smart and fast IDE. Yes, I notice am flip/flopping on my statement of not being an IDE fan but am a Software Engineer and we use the best tool for the job even if the tool might not be your favorite ;-).

Building and Dependency Management

I started with ant because of its resemblance to C’s make in imperativeness. However as with all things imperatively programmed it became really unsustainable for bigger projects as the LOCs tend to go so high that they start interfering with with development flow. Looking through the OSS java projects on the Internet I noticed that maven had been sort of set up as the defacto choice for all massive projects. I also like the fact that its sort of Convention over Configuration and so I don’t have to spend a lot of time re-writing the same logic over and over again like I was doing with ant. So maven is now my build tool of choice. Maven is also amazing at dependency management. With ant I had to manually download all the jars and add them to my classpath. Now I just specifiy all the external dependencies as such in the pom.xml file and viola!

Testing Framework

Junit is the little test framework that I’ve so far learned to use, one could argue that that choice was a no brainer as Junit bears a strong resemblance Ruby’s own MiniTest. I also adopted it because I was familiar with the people who built it and trust the design decisions they make.

Enterprise EE Framework

And lastly enterprise application development. Initially I used java ee libraries straight up to build web services and applications. That again was like trying to write build rules with ant yet there’s something like maven. I like “niche frameworks”. In the Ruby world I use Rails for web application development. I use the Qt framework with GUI development. And so on. In the Java world I’ve found that the Spring framework makes development with Java EE so not dreary. Spring makes building Java EE applications something one can look forward to like a 6 year-old can’t wait for December 24th to get done so he can unwrap his gift.

Books that have helped me along the way:

  • Effective Java, second Edition. Written by Joshua Bloch
  • The Java Language Specification, Java se 8 edition. Written by James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Gilad Bracha and Alex Buckley
  • Java 8 in action
  • Spring in Action
  • The Java EE 7 Tutorial , Release 7, for Java EE Platform
  • Junit tutorial
  • maven tutorial
  • SOA using Java Web services, by Mark D Hansen
  • Proffesional Java development with the Spring framework, by Rod Johnson et al.
  • Algorithms, Fourth Edition. Written by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne. A book that teaches implementation of general algorithms in the Java language.