Sometimes I can’t help but getting nostalgic when I think about the old days when Microsoft Visual Studio was the benchmark for Integrated Development Environments. Back then when I used Visual C++ 2.0 the first time, I immediately fell in love with it. The IDE ran under Windows NT (I refused to use Windows 3.1 and 95 for anything productive), had an excellent editor and kick-ass debugger, was fast, and just did what it was supposed to do without getting in my way. The following releases improved on that foundation and introduced features such as IntelliSense, incremental Compilation and minimal Rebuild. Everything was good in Developer Land.
Unfortunately, all of that ended with the release of Visual Studio .Net 2002. This was the first release which introduced support for the .Net Framework in the IDE. Don’t get me wrong. I still regard the .Net Framework as one of Microsoft’s better products, but this post is about Visual Studio and the impact the framework plus other contributing factors had on the quality of IDE. Visual Studio .Net 2002 took approximately two hours to install on my relatively powerful workstation. After that, when I was allowed to launch the IDE, the greatly increased startup time was immediately noticeable. But hey that’s the price you got to pay for all those shiny new features right?
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Tags:
Asp.net,
Eclipse,
IntelliJ,
Microsoft,
Resharper,
Visual Studio
I’ve spent the past week juggling with GWT, Maven 2, Eclipse, Jetty 6 and Tomcat 6. My goal was:
- Run GWT hosted mode using noserver switch in order to use my own application server / container. The reason for this was that I wanted to experiment with Jetty 6’s continuations and Tomcat 6’s Cometprocessor servlet interface
- Keep full debugging support for both server and client code in Eclipse in noserver mode
- Fully automated command line builds, packing and deployments using Maven
Switching to noserver hosted mode in GWT has a couple of implications. When using the -noserver flag, your external server is used by the GWT Hosted Mode browser to serve up both your dynamic content, and all static content (such as the GWT application’s host page, other HTML files, images, CSS, and so on.). GWT’s internal Tomcat is no longer used. This also means that you are totally on your own with everything happening on the server side.
First task was ensuring full server side debugging support with Jetty as servlet container. Although I should be technically possible (somehow) to get this to work using WTP, I opted against this and instead went for the Jetty Launcher eclipse plugin. As it turned out, this plugin hasn’t be updated in ages and did not support Jetty 6 (only version 6 and higher of Jetty supports continuations). After digging trough the forums I’ve discovered a patch for the Jetty Launcher that provided Jetty 6 compatibility. Building a custom version of the plugin proved difficult because I did not have any previous experience with compiling eclipse plugins and the instructions by the author of the patch were kind of vague. In the end I figured it out and the plugin was working flawless. (Feel free to email me for the binaries if you would like to avoid going through the same).
The situation with Tomcat was very similar. I choose the Sysdeo Tomcat Launcher plugin enabled it for my project and .. ran into the next problem. Unlike Jetty, Tomcat does not load any classes from the environment classpath. Which posed a problem because I rather wanted to avoid storing my project dependencies at another location than the local maven repository which was not a problem for Jetty since the Jetty Launcher simply passed the local maven repository folder as a classpath entry to jetty which in turn happily loaded everything directly from the repository. For tomcat there was no solution but utilize the maven-dependency-plugin to populate <hosted_webappfolder>/WEB-INF/lib during the packaging phase with the maven project dependencies from the maven repos.
Now that the problems are solved, I am able to develop and debug in noserver mode at least just as comfortable as before without the –noserver switch but at the advantage of being in total control of the servlet container and being able to use the latest server features as well.
Tags:
Eclipse,
GWT,
Jetty,
Tomcat
I’ve recently stumbled upon O’Reilly Safari and after using it for a couple weeks I don’t want to miss this great service anymore. Having instant access to thousands of books from all the major publishers is a huge boost in an industry as dynamic as IT. The only downside is the price which at 40$/monthly isn’t exactly cheap but well worth the money considering how much time you can potentially save by using it.
They also have a cheaper edition called “O’Reilly Bookshelf” which allows to to preselect ten books which you can search at any time.
Tags:
Books,
Safari
Since I recently fell in love with Maven 2 I’ve been looking for ways to integrate this great tool as tightly as possible into my development routine. What I wanted was to manage all project configuration information through maven and just have my java IDE of choice - eclipse - pull all project related information from pom.xml.
My first stop was the maven-eclipse-plugin which you register in your pom.xml as plugin to maven and then by issuing a “mvn eclipse:eclipse” generate all eclipse project information from there. Initially everything was looking good, until I actually tried to run my test web application in Tomcat from within eclipse. The web application came up just fine but failed to resolve any references to the business logic project it depended on. After a while I figured out that maven-eclipse-plugin is able to reflect inter project dependencies into the generated eclipse project files - which makes a build in eclipse complete without errors - but what it is unable to do is to mark those dependend project outputs for inclusion into the deployment process (ie add them to the J2EE Module dependencies). Of course the work-around would be manually check the J2EE Module dependencies for those projects but that would defeat the intial purpose of managing everything through maven. While googling for solutions I stumbled over this ancient thread which explains the problem in all it’s glory.
Enter m2eclipse which works quite opposite to the maven-eclipse-plugin since it is an eclipse plugin rather than a maven plugin. Seems to do what it is supposed to do, namely solving the problem with the J2EE Module Depedency by introducing it’s own classpath container to eclipse which encapsulates all maven artifacts. What I’m currently missing is the ability to bootstrap a project solely using maven because m2eclipse lacks (to my knowledge) the abilty to generate or import pom.xml into eclipse. Nonetheles I think I’ll stick to it for the time being.
Tags:
Eclipse,
Maven
As you might have noticed the old weichhold.com is gone and the web content has moved to this shiny new site. There were several reasons for this decision. To give you a little insight: the former site was hosted on a dedicated linux box running debian located a Hetzner’s Nürnberg facility. At the beginning the server was just handling email and the website using my own asp.net based CMS. But over the years more and more services were hosted on this box ranging from an MMO guild forum to our family picture gallery. Not surprisingly the amount of time spent with administration work increased by an equal amount - don’t get me wrong: I’m still totally convinced that linux/bsd hosting is the right way to go in terms of stability, security and scalability - I just don’t have the time anymore to manage it on my own.
Another aspect for my decision to “outsource” everything was the quality and maturity levels that content management systems like squarespace.com have reached by now - the squarespace CMS is absolutely incredible and beats everything I’ve used so far hands down. So here we are. My web content is served by squarespace, email/calendar/contacts is hosted by google and our pictures reside on flickr.
P.S: If you are looking for dedicated hosting solution give Hetzner a shot. These guys are just great. If you’ve ever experienced the so-called support of some hosting companies, you appreciate that calling hetzner’s support line connects you directly with the technician with physical access to your machine.
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Marvin and I had a fun day together that concluded with a boat trip on Frankfurt’s Main River. You can tell by the picture that he quite enjoyed the trip :)
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