Build-averse

After reading this blog entry, I had a personal epiphany of sorts (or was it?). I realized that one of the reasons I love using Eclipse is: I hate building. Well, not really hate. It's just that, sometimes, I consider it a part of "noise" in the signal-to-noise of writing software. Or, maybe I'm just too lazy. Or, I just didn't know how useful (and perfectly natural) having a continuous build would be.

Most probably it's all of the above :-)

What's out and about, Nov. 29 2007

Hidden under the myriad of Android docs is a gem for anyone writing embedded Java applications: Writing Efficient Android Code.

While some of the concepts there presented would make many a software architect/OO practitioner cringe (Prefer Virtual Over Interface?), the writer is careful enough to advise when (or when not) to do something.

And speaking of gems, I found another presentation that describes how you can use Eclipse CDT to introspect C source code a la DOM. It even describes how the Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) project used it to implement some neat features such as barrier analysis, call graph, and identifying potential deadlocks. Pretty exciting for me... having a DOM AST available opens up a lot of possibilities. Think code metrics, static code analysis, visualization, refactoring, etc. integrated into the same IDE in which you write the code.

What's out and about, Nov. 28 2007

Android is out and has been generating a lot of buzz. Ahh.. what having an extra $10 million wouldn't do for your platform. ;-)

Personally, I like the fact that the main development environment is Eclipse, but I guess it also makes a lot of sense for Google. It's free, it's powerful, it's mature, it's open source, and it has an excellent plug-in architecture that lets anyone add features quite easily. (Quite the fanboy, I am, eh?)

Speaking of Eclipse, its Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) is also out and is pretty exciting. It lets you write rich Ajax applications using Java and also leverage the powerful OSGi capabilities of Eclipse. That means reusable components (and Eclipse itself has some very good ones such as JFace, EMF, etc.), and some very powerful IDE support. In fact, some RCP applications can be easily ported to a web (RAP) application with some minimal modifications. Personally, this is great news since I don't really have any kind of code-fu for JavaScript.

For some demos on what RAP can do, see here.

The Obligatory First Post

Might as well get it over with :-)