Greetings all,
Well, it's been about 3 weeks since I've installed linux with a dual
boot setup on my NT box in order to do java development. Thanks to all
who offered advice and encouragement.
I've tried all the popular java ide's on NT, Visual Age, Visual Cafe,
JBuilder, etc., but I must say, my favorite development setup is the
one on Linux. KDE with usually 4 screens. (1) for xemacs, a couple of
xterm's and running my java code with jdk117_v1a; (2) for
netscape/javadocs; (3) for togetherJ whiteboard edition; and (4) for
browsing the web and getting mail. Still haven't gotten Makefile to
work, but I get some ideas for that when I get back to work Monday.
(Any sample Makefiles for java would be appreciated - TIA)
Anyway, the thing with linux is that it seems to run java code faster
than NT. NetBeans on the NT side (200MHz K6 w/128MB ram) is almost
unusable, but on linux, it's not so bad. Also, with togetherJ, there
are times that there are two jvm's going and switching screens
causes a noticeably faster repaint for togetherJ on linux.
I really like togetherJ. I'm trying to get up to speed on OO modeling
and this is a great tool (and the whiteboard edition is free, too) Both
togetherJ and NetBeans seem to me to be good examples of OO app's and
I'm getting some good ideas for my own personal project. Which I'm glad
to report is going much better since I trashed everything I had and
started over with the linux setup.
There have been a number of threads on what's the best ide/development
system. My opinion is that it depends on where you're at. I'm a
self-taught programmer and found some of the ide's helpful getting up
to speed. I'm still interested in looking at the code they produce, but
figure now I can do as well or better. At work, we have some developers
using PowerJ for prototyping and I guess that's all right. But then we
"real" developers hand code it for production using jdk and xemacs.
JBuilder's code inspector brought me up to speed on swing pretty quick.
I figured it was worth the money just for the learning. Hey, knowing
swing got me my current job which is working on a big CORBA project.
One further observation. IMHO, the learning curve for linux doesn't
seem to be that steep but rather more gradual and it does takes time.
Somehow learning linux makes me feel smarter, where windows at first
made me feel dumber. At least until I got it that what was wrong was
windows, not me. Theory: could windows have contributed to a loss
of national IQ points? The dumbing down of a country? Slashdot had an
interesting article by some professor that said that literacy for high
school students should include basic linux. Great idea! I'd add some
basic java literacy, also.
OK, here's a research topic for some grad student: can linux/java
training raise national IQ?
Well, that's all for now.
Best wishes to everyone for the new year
Michael
