The Search Guy: Interesting search topics and random musings

I was having a quick look at the new NetBeans 6.7M2 this morning, and look what I found in the plugins list:

W00t! Jackpot is back!

Man, I could have totally used this a couple of weeks ago. I was switching from using custom logging in Minion to using java.util.logging Jackpot would have relieved me of the need for a very evil Perl script (is there another kind? (I kid, I kid!)) and a lot of hand editing.

Extra awesomeness: Prolog editing mode! Now I can dust off the family tree NLP system that I wrote for CS240 (using Waterloo Prolog on an IBM mainframe, no less) in 1987!

We've been working on code cleanup, documentation, and sample programming for the search engine. Along the way I wanted to replace a method call returning an Iterator backed by a collection that could change with a method that would return a copy of the List and then get its iterator, thereby avoiding the dreaded ConcurrentModificationException.

This sounded like a good time to try Jackpot. I had to install the development build of Netbeans 6 to get the development update center, but once that was done, it took about 5 minutes to write the Jackpot query to replace the old code with the new.

Having done something simple, I wrote a set of queries to replace a bunch of delegated methods in a class with a getter for the object to which the methods were being delegated and then calling the appropriate method on that object. The queries took about 20 minutes to write and then a few more minutes to debug and run.

All told, I reckon it took about an hour to do what would have taken a few hours of typing, compiling and fixing bugs. Thanks, Jackpot!