Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Vaadin is an interesting RIA platform built by Vaadin, LTD. Vaadin differs from your standard RIA by existing almost exclusively on the server. All application state remains on the server and all events are handled through communication with the server. The display layer is written as a layer above GWT and the whole project is open source and free. This evaluation post is the first in a series of my lessons learned while evaluating this framework.

Vaadin is a good fit for all the web-applications that fit in the general bucket of “enterprise support tools.” The reasons why are covered after the jump.

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In our XSTL workflow we make use of a lot of XPATH 2.0 features, such as it’s built-in regex support. Unfortunately, the default Java6 XML parsers only support XPATH 1.0. The library we settled on is Saxon HE, since it was free, supported the features we needed, and could be extended with Java functions.

One of my tasks was to convert all relative paths in an XHTML document to absolute paths. The server prefix was set as variable in the stylesheet. The transformer would have to determine if the selected path is a relative url, then work to resolve what the absolute path is based on the root passed into the page. It could be done with an advanced XSTL template, but since we already had the resolution function written in Java, it made more sense to write a Java plugin to Saxon. One of the missing features of Saxon HE is the seamless, reflection based integration of plugins. However, one can use the Extension Function API to achieve the same results.
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There are a few cardinal sins for a developer: deleting the production database, deploying code to the wrong machine, and sending out emails to all the mock users. These situations happen because the terminal window on production looks an awful lot like the terminal window on dev. I don’t have solutions to the first two problems, but preventing emails to the test user database is pretty easy in Ruyb on Rails.
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Having the process automatically set the name of the terminal in OSX almost never works for me. A little googling turned up the bash sequence for setting the process name in the terminal.

echo -n -e "\033]0;TerminalName\007"

This command will set the name of the terminal to “TerminalName.”

Instead of trying to remember this string, I created a little shellscript:

#!/bin/bash
 
echo -n -e "\033]0;$1\007"

I called this script setname and put it in /usr/local/bin. Then you can call it with:

setname TerminalName

I really like Java enums as a way to organize and consolidate all the string constants that come with building systems with a lot of settings files. In our case in particular, we have an ETL process that moves data between sources that have no knowledge of each other. All checks to ensure that there are only valid values in each system need to happen in the Java code. Enums are perfect for this, but some of our settings are hierarchical and it’s a little unclear how this would work in code.
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If you’re a web-developer, one of the best features of Eclipse is the JBoss IDE plugin. The mere fact that you don’t have to re-compile/re-deploy the war for every change saves countless hours per build.

If you don’t want to use Eclipse, you can replicate this behavior with Maven and run the app out of your working directory.
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I’m not a software developer, entrepreneur, or engineer. That’s just what I do. There’s a lot that I’m interested in beyond my work. For the longest time, my online presence has been at ViJedi.net. However, in the era of micro-blogging and increased social interaction on the web, I’ve found myself holding back from posting things that I find interesting. I’m always faced with the fact that half my audience doesn’t really care that I went to park and took some pictures. The other half doesn’t care that Slicehost rocks or are interested in a new Spring MVC trick.

So from today on, ViJedi.net will be about software, technology, the software development process and other startup-y topics. All my personal posts, like pictures, random thoughts and the rest will be at a new blog tejus.tumblr.com. Thanks for reading.

It’s over, we’re done. No need to come by and collect your stuff. Your workspace is already in the trash. There’s no trace you were even here.

I still remember when I first gave you a shot. I had tried other IDE’s, but all they seemed to offer where headaches. Vim and Ant simply worked better.

But then you came along, with compile as you type and amazing CVS integration. Suddenly, my collection of a half dozen command line utilities were reduced to one. I was so taken with SWT and it’s ability to look native on each platform, that I even wrote an entire application in it.

My love only grew when I took a professional development job. I had to use Windows, you made it possible to get something done. But looking back, that’s also when our relationship started to crack. We switched from CVS to SVN, negating one of the greatest advantages you had.

I switched jobs again and this time I was introduced to Intellij IDEA. Sure it was nice, but it didn’t compare to you. It’s version control integration was confusing. It didn’t support all features and languages you did, and it’s auto-compile just didn’t work as nicely. I stuck with you.

But the cracks that appeared earlier started growing. Each new feature you supported and every new plugin written for you never seemed to work right. Everything had rough edges, caveats, and felt distinct from everything else in the system.

You just didn’t take care of yourself. As computers got faster, you got slower. Every editor seems slow to respond to keyboard input. The XML editor is the single worst editor I have ever used. Typing in your IDE shouldn’t feel like telneting over a dial-up connection. You started bloating up to the size of a beached whale in a sad attempt to be everything to everyone. While you allowed everyone to attach to you, you forgot about what made you great in the first place, Java development.

You didn’t keep up with the best practices. You don’t work well with maven projects. Refactoring doesn’t work across the entire workspace. You should never ask me for the location of the source for a class when it is in your workspace. It’s 2010, these are things you should do right by now.

One of your great features was the ability to use external editors for resources managed by the IDE. Unfortunately, whether or not that file was refreshed in the workspace seemed like a decision that rested in God’s hands.

Lets not even talk about version control. The subclipse/subversive split was a disaster and your git support is a joke. You once replaced my entire stack of tools. Now to get anything done, I now have to open a bunch of terminals, gitx, textmate, and you.

Remember that other IDE I played around with? It’s kept itself in shape. It looks better than it ever has. It never promised to do everything, and that’s left it with few wrinkles and sharp edges. It works with a Maven project structure, has real support for Git, and does a fantastic job of editing Java. And now it’s open source too, just like you.

That’s why it’s over. It’s always sad to see something with so much promise ruined by neglect and bloat. But it is what it is and it’s time to move on.