Saturday January 20, 2007

Using development builds of Netbeans FAQ

I often come across questions about the current state of the development builds of NetBeans, so I decided to create a small FAQ and post in my blog.

Is possible to use current version of NB 6.0 to do some "real work"?

These days virtually all the NetBeans developers are using most recent (daily) builds to develop NetBeans itself. This means that at the very least more than 50 people are doing "real work" dealing with more than 20 000 java source files. I reckon there is about the same amount of people working on various NB add ons who do the same.

It is quite exciting to see new features in your work tool added day by day and there are not as many stability problems as one might expect. However if improving the quality of NetBeans is not a priority for your organization you will want to stick to the official releases. Surprises are not good for business, you want to minimize the number of things interfering with your deadlines in the first place.

What are the milestone builds good for?

Milestone builds allow us to:

• keep balance between feature growth and stability throughout the development process
• deliver relatively stable development releases on regular basis
• keep track of release progress

We set goals and try to achieve them during 3 weeks of development. Then we spend one week on intensive testing and removing outstanding problems. A milestone build is not released until all the crucial bugs designated by the Quality Assurance team are not fixed. No other changes are allowed during that time, as every change carry a risk of introducing new problems. Basically it is a release process in small.

Using a milestone build is a reasonable trade-off for most developers who rely on the state-of-art NB features

What kind of problems may I encounter when using development builds of NetBeans?

• wizards and refactorings may be generate wrong/suboptimal code.
• the format of project, configuration, form, etc. files generated by the development builds is not guaranteed to be supported in the future, manual amendments might be needed to open them from a newer version of the IDE
• you might enter exception loop and have to restart the IDE

On the other hand you may (almost) rely on the core functionality such as:

• I/O (opening/saving files/projects)
• version control subsystem
• compilation
• debugging standalone java applications

What are the most fragile areas in current builds of NB 6.0?

As of milestone 6: refactoring, java hints and all the Enterprise/Web functionality. All this stuff had to be completely rewritten to use the new, more powerful editor and language model infrastructure. Some basic functionality like encapsulating fields is still missing, using some existing features like "rename class" may mess up your code.

Tuesday January 09, 2007

Breaking up with Apple

I purchased iWork 05 and I was not able to use it a year later on my new Intel-based MB Pro. I paid for upgrading OS X just to be able to use Java 5. Yet I was easy to forgive, satisfied and full of enthusiasm for their technology.

It wasn't until the MacWorld keynote (2 hours ago), in particular the info on partnership with Cingular that I realized how evil those guys were.

Wake up, those folks seem to be dreaming to lock us all up with their own stuff using patents, exclusive licenses and proprietary data formats, they do open software and standards only when necessary!

PS1. This post is emotional rather than factual, I may change my mind in a couple of hours

PS2. I am looking for good materials on using Linux as a primary OS on MB Pro

Update (answering the comments)

• The thing that bothers me the most in the alliance with a single cellular operator is that I would not be able to change SIM card when abroad, paying the roaming fees is out of question for me
• I was not accurate saying I was not able to use iWork '05 on Intel Mac. I was just so disappointed with the performance and stability of other apps written for PPC and running on Rosetta, that I did not bother to try iWork (I believe it could behave better as Apple product). For example MPlayer would crash the OS completely every time when run, only disconnecting power supply and removing the battery could bring it back to life..