The FonePIM Developer Program has been launched in the last few weeks. I had the pleasure of working on this project inside in NewBay before christmas. The FonePIM developer program is the first developer program uniquely designed for developers to test both SyncML v1.1.2 and v1.2 clients against a SyncML server.

I got a subversion repo. up and running on my desktop at home over the weekend. The reasoning was two fold – 1. A manageable way to work on some of my projects from my desktop and from my laptop without anything like rsync or copying directly. 2. To get familiar with subversion at last! And wow – I”m not particularly excited about how easy it was to setup, browse or the speed of it checking out / committing – but simply excited about the lack of network access required to work away on the code base! Perforce and CVS – two version control systems I’ve used before heavily are a dog for this – and even with network access, if it’s low bandwidth – the pause between opening for edit and editing is significant. So wahey subversion!

Today with the release of IntelliJ 5.1 – we can now all look forward to the new EAP cycle and IntelliJ 6.0. I’m getting ahead of myself of course; but the Demetra Roadmap sure looks packed full of goodness. I really need to get my act together and start coding plugins!

A lot of things have been happening since I last posted. I dropped in on TechCamp held over the weekend. Hats off to the organisers, I’m sorry I didn’t stick around for more drinks afterwards.

I played an insanely long game of Civ3 recently. I started it first thing after work on Friday. I believe it ended after midnight Saturday. 28hour game. I won at Monarch. Space Race. I can remember how the whole game played out and because of that I’m feeling just slightly bitter and unsatisfied. Maybe this weekend again though

My Laptop has been upgraded to Ubuntu Breezy. I love it. Highly recommended. The Dapper Drake is going head to head with Vista; so I hope the lads make the best of the next 6 months.

Work at NewBay is going well. I’ve some time to do some genuine research which I’m pleased with and also scope to work on some really fun stuff. And the 9 to 5 coding and performance testing isn’t bad either!

Still don’t have the keys to our apartment in Drimnagh. I reckon it won’t be until next month. Which leaves me in a bit of a bind because I promised one John Character my room.

I’ve registered ActiveObjects.biz. More on this later.

The latest west47 is up.

GalwayLAN is on next weekend. It’ll be the first one in the last three that I’ll have my laptop. I’m going to make the most of it. Coding of course.

I got an email recently informing me of the existance of the planned TechCamp Ireland. I think this is a fantastic idea, one which many geeks may have had before. And hopefully this will be the realisation. I know a few people who’ve registered. Sean O’Donnell a former comrade in arms will be there along with John Breslin. It’s on the 15th of October. The gist of the event is geekathon with everyone attending having to contribute with a 15ming+ session or talk.

I’ve just setup, here at NewBay, CruiseControl 2.2.1. There was nothing to it except…
1. On Linux the p4 plugin in cruise is a bit foo. Had to hack P4.java to get this to work.
2. I also hacked cruises Schedule.java in an attempt to fix what looked like a date parsing issue. In the end taking out the multiple property in the config.xml sorted this out.

So then I had finally a stable cruise up and running polling our perforce server. Next I decided to indulge myself and get a ‘modular’ build up and running. ‘Modularity Build’ is a tool by Malcolm Sparks that essentially replaces the need for maintaining your ant build script when introducing dependencies, extracting source trees, removing dependencies etc… Basically it has been my experience that with a little upfront effort (not much mind you; creating some templates) that using modularity-build reduces or completely removes the need to maintain your build script. It also allows you to extract modules of code with hierarchal dependencis that lead to a much cleaner seperation and ultimately complete reuse among other projects. How does modularity-build know what your projects dependencies are? Simply point it at your IDE of choice’s project file!

Once cruise was building our project; I put modularity to the test… There were a few obvious modules lingering in our code base. In IntelliJ -> Create new modules, move a bunch of source files over, setup a dependency and commit!

Next thing ya know cruise is reporting a successful build. Modular Bliss.

I’m sure this will not be the only time I post on this matter. I’ve been a huge fan of JetBrains java IDE IntelliJ for the last two years since been introduced to it at 3Q. A guy called Steve Quinlan there showed me the ropes and nailed the hotkey printout to my monitor. Their tagline is ‘develop with pleasure’ – this I have found is an understatement. However there are subtle differences using IntelliJ under linux and windows. I’ve been using IntelliJ on and off inside of Linux for the past two years… and more intensively lately. (8-10+ hours a day). Those subtle differences are in fact IntelliJ Linux Annoyances; and can sometimes turn using IntelliJ on Linux into a distinctly non-pleasurable experience.

1. Popups don’t always have focus and sometimes ‘Alt-F1 -> Project & Enter’ does not bring you to the Project panel :/ This is a documented bug; but they put it down to window manager handling. KDE works & GNOME doesn’t. I’m not moving to KDE anytime soon… I’d rather live with this one.

2. Since the last stable releases [5.0.1] my package level tests don’t run. Throwing a null pointer exception somewhere in IntelliJ’s guts trying to configure a classpath.

3. Debugging Tomcat Session can be flaky under Linux – always smooth in Windows.

4. Sometimes you need to focus out and in again for text editing to work.

After all that though, in my opinion there is no alternative to IntelliJ out there for the professional java developer.