My current and ongoing role involves developing web based application
for internal corporate use. The majority of applications are one-man
end-to-end developments though some may have two or (for the really
big stuff) three people involved. The people that I work with are
good developers but have hideously outdated working practices (I still
get handed Java classes with 300+ line methods, for instance). I want
to clean the place up, starting with the development tools. Listed
below are some of the tools that we currently use for software
development:
Operating System:
Developing on Windows XP on Dell hardware (laptops and desktops).
Deploying to Web app servers on Unix boxes.
No option to change this and anyway, it's the least of my problems.
Archiving and Version Control:
CVS - Getting everyone to use it was a key achievement for me in
2008.
I think I'd be lynched if I now said "Actually, I think we should
be using git/Mercurial/Subversion/etc.".
CVS has the advantage of being centrally hosted by the company.
I'm not sure I want the extra
overhead of running my own alternative but maybe.
Build Tool:
Ant - Occasionally hand built but usually Eclipse generated.
Automated End-to-End Builds:
I can do them (in a couple of stages), others just export a war
file from eclipse and load it onto the server and...
IDE:
Eclipse - I use the latest development build but most here use
whatever the latest company approved standard release was when they
received their current machine.
Language:
Java: I've dabbled in Scala and Groovy. Several other people here
are aware non-Java languages (other than basic) exist.
Currently version 1.5. I got 1.6 loaded onto the server box
last year but we haven't developed to it yet.
I cannot hand off projects in other languages to the
maintenance groups.
Testing:
JUnit: I use it. The others are suitably impressed but not
convinced it's worth "coding everything twice".
JMock: I use and love it but until the others even start using
JUnit, there's no sense in pushing it.
Web Stuff:
HTML and CSS: Hand made (by software developers like me) with many
bastardised cut and paste inclusions.
Followed with long sessions of UA where they kick back all the
stuff that looks like it was designed by
a five-year-old in the 1990s.
Web Hosting:
Internally on a corporately maintained and backed up Unix box
running Tomcat 6.
More Web Stuff:
An unholy mixture of JSP and JSF, bulked out with Primefaces for
some extra glitzy bling.
Database:
Oracle: Yay, we finally got the last developer to stop using MS
Access last year (by banning it)!
(That guy only writes Excel VBA so he's out of the loop anyway.)
It's a corporate database and very well maintained though I haven't
figured out what planet the DBAs are from.
Other stuff:
FileZilla, PuTTY, Beyond Compare, SQL Developer, TortoiseCVS....
the list goes on.
So. This lots does work (more or less) and (I don't think) that it's
as bad as it sounds, but it really isn't a good situation. What I'm
looking for is ideas on how to clean all this development environment
up. It's a mess of good ideas that are currently badly integrated.
There are just too many different and independent components to this
environment to persuade people that adopting it is progress, and the
learning curve is endless.
I'm looking for -sensible - ideas on how to clean all this up. What
technologies to drop or swap and how best to create a complete
integrated development environment (in the non-eclipse/NetBeans
sense).
Any suggestions welcome.
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