Today I am loathing working with Java, Eclipse, and stupid third-party libraries

[andrewducker]

So, I'm still working on the Delicious posting replacement.

And I'm getting there*, but some of it is very frustrating.

Java has some things that are frustrating, particularly as I can see the places where C# improved them. Properties, for instance. And Iterators. The latter is now a lot nicer as of more recent versions of Java, but that's bugger all use most of the time, as I'm using libraries that were written back in the stone age, when you had to do all the heavy lifting yourself. None of the libraries, for instance, have used generics for their lists, which is particularly annoying me.

On top of that, there's Eclipse. Which has lots of lovely refactoring tools, but lacks polish. In VS**, if I want to rename a variable I just type over bits of it, and then tell it that I want all references to that variable to be updated to this new name. In Eclipse I have to tell it first that I want to rename this variable and then change it. It doesn't sound like much, but it's just less user-friendly. Similarly, the intellisense _tries_, but it's not quite as good. A fair chunk of the time I have to press Ctrl-Space to make it offer me suggestions for variable names, rather than it popping them up as I type. Oh, and don't get me started on the faff I had to go through to get my code transferring back and forth between two machines - using Git wasn't a big problem, but when it turned out I had Eclipse 3.5 on one machine, and 3.6 on the other, trying to just upgrade in place took an hour and a half and didn't work, so I ended up blowing away Eclipse on the laptop and reinstalling.

And then to cap it all there are third party libraries that don't ship with all of their dependencies, and sometimes don't mention that they have them at all. I picked up a library to work with Delicious, got a bunch of code in place for it, and only when I actually went to run it did I then get an error telling me that it has a dependency on Apache HTTPClient. So now I'm off to download that as well, and see whether that slots neatly into Google App Engine or not. I had the same issue with the feed parser I used, which turned out to be dependent on the Apache Xerces XML parser.

The actual code I'm producing is just fine, but the faff necessary to get it in place is just massively annoying.

*You can see where I'm up to here.
**Visual Studio, the MS equivalent.

Comments

[birguslatro]

These are problems REBOL was intended to solve, but hasn't quite got there yet. The most recent post from its (overworked it seems) creator...

http://www.rebol.com/article/0509.html

And an earlier, less precise rant...

http://www.rebol.com/article/0497.html

[andrewducker]

Both of those sound like rants from someone ignorant about software - complaining about problems, but not offering any solutions.

[birguslatro]

"ignorant about software"? You've not heard of him?

[andrewducker]

Nope, hadn't really encountered REBOL before either.

And now I've had a look at it, I'm not terribly impressed.

(I mean, I'm impressed that he's created a language from scratch, that's not something many people manage, just not particularly impressed with that one.)

[birguslatro]

Oh, thousands of people have created languages from scratch, but not so many operating systems from scratch. He's done both, so hardly ignorant about software.

REBOL's a lovely language, but has painted itself into a corner by not being open-source, so the current version lacks bits here and there which it really needs for prime-time. And the next version's been in development for five years or so and is in something of a hiatus at the moment.

[andrewducker]

It looks very much like something that works fantastically well when you want to do exactly what the creator wants, but is less good if you differ.

To give an example (and I'm happy to be corrected here, I've only taken a very quick look), you create a button with something like "btn "Clear" [clear-all]" - but that's only given you a couple of parameters, which are set in a particular order. What does one do if one wants to set any other parameters?

It's a neat scripting language, in other words - but looking at the FAQ, if you want to do anything complex in it you'll be using REBOL/Command to write extensions to it to give you the functionality you need.

[birguslatro]

Firstly, there's basically two REBOLs, REBOL/Core, which is the guts of the language, and REBOL/View, which is Core plus graphics and a GUI (called VID).

Now with REBOL you can create 'dialects', which are simple domain-specific languages, and that's what VID is - a dialect for creating GUIs. (You could create your own from scratch if you wanted to instead of using VID.)

And 'btn "Clear" [clear-all]' is part of VID, not Core, so not actually REBOL code proper. That is, except for the 'clear-all' in the block, which VID processes as standard REBOL code. (A 'block' being the data enclosed within brackets. And everything in REBOL is within a block.) So consider 'clear-all' to be a function, but in that block there could be any number of lines of standard REBOL code.

As to the order after 'btn', it doesn't really matter (in VID). The following two lines behave the same...

btn "Clear" [clear-all]
btn [clear-all] "Clear"

and to add extra parameters, well, just add them...

btn "Clear" [clear-all] red
btn [clear-all] 255.0.0 "Clear"

That gives you a red button in both cases, 'red' already being defined as '255.0.0', which is a datatype called a tuple.

And datatypes are what makes the above orderless parameters work. (REBOL has lots of datatypes!) If it's a string then it's the button's text, if it's a block then that's REBOL code to be run when the button's clicked on, if it's a tuple then that's the button's colour, if it's a number then that's the button's width, etc. All of which just override default settings of course.

This is real good for knocking up a working GUI very quickly. My main complaint with it, (meaning View's graphic engine - not VID), is there's no changing of styles or fonts within a block of text. And I'm talking about displaying the text, not just editing it.

I've not found I've needed Command, but your needs differ no doubt.

[andrewducker]

Ok, so I found the right version of HTTPClient (it's a deprecated older version, but it's there). Oh, but that's dependent on the Apache Commons Codec component.

And then... a miracle! Deep in the bowels of sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/delicious-java/files/delicious-java/1.14/

There's a download link that includes Dependencies! Woohoo!

[andrewducker]

Aaaaand not woohoo. Dependent on SSLSockets, which Google App Engine doesn't support.

Bugger.

Ok - time to look into this in more detail.

[fub.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. "Enterprise" frameworks such as Java and .Net make it hard to Just Get Stuff Done. Yes, you can do a lot of different Stuff by tweaking things, but that unfortunately also means you have to tweak things -- even if you just want the most sensible default.
Why did you decide to write the thing in Java anyway?

[andrewducker]

Because I loathe dynamically typed languages with a burning passion. The lack of refactoring support alone makes me itch.

And it's not Java that's a problem here, largely, it's people providing libraries that are ancient, and don't come with their dependencies.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

I'm curious - what is it that's constraining your language choice to Java-or-something-unspecified-but-dynamically-typed?

[andrewducker]

I'm using this as a test project to acclimatise myself to Google App Engine, which means Python, Java or Go.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough then! Cool.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Do you use Maven? Maven is AFAICT much, much better than anything that comes with VS.

[andrewducker]

I thought Maven was a build manager, not an IDE?

At work we use Hudson/Jenkins for CI, and Sonar for code quality.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

You're right - I mention it because you mention "there are third party libraries that don't ship with all of their dependencies" - and because given the downsides you're experiencing with doign Java development after C#, I though I'd mention an upside :-)

[andrewducker]

I'm fairly sure that we use Maven with Sonar and the DotNet plugin at work. (We run both Java and C# code through it).

I am tempted to play with other UIs, now I have the basics working. I'm just a bit nervous of breaking what I have.

I've heard good things about IntelliJ.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Eclipse (and Netbeans too) is a POS.
Never mind autocompletion and that sort of thing -- I am still used to plain text editors so I don't use those anyway. What I can't stand about Eclipse is that it can't even do basic text manipulation that is *PART OF THE HOST OS SPEC*. Like double-click + drag to select by words. Or selecting whole lines and dragging them. Or copy-dragging chunks of text. That sort of absolute basic stuff.

[andrewducker]

Double-click+drag works for me for selection words.
Dragging and copy-dragging also works fine.

That's on 3.6 - don't know which version you used.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Hmmm *squinty eyes* Maybe they've fixed those since I last tried it. But every time I try, there's something basic still missing.
Also, the UI is a clutter of tiny little buttons which are incomprehensible. Panes collapse or disappear and I don't know how to get them back. I've tried to use Eclipse because of its debugger, and actually did manage to get that working last year, but then it stopped working so not used it since then...

[andrewducker]

It's still a mess. The problem is it's a generic IDE framework that's feels kludged together, rather than something honed to just being a Java IDE. Shame that.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's a problem with an IDE covering multiple languages -- you just need to make the language-specific stuff like highlighting and completion and documentation lookup frameworky so it pulls in configuration or functionality per-language. It's just a UI mess, and probably a code mess under the hood.