New Laptop
I finally got my new work laptop yesterday. For the past month and a half I had been using my personal Dell Latitude D620 for daily development. It is a good little workhorse but is getting a bit dated in the CPU department and I’ve never been particularly fond of the screen, which I always found a bit too dim.
Now say hello to my little friend (and the D620′s big brother), the Latitude E6500. I got it with the 15″ LED-back lit screen, which I can’t recommend highly enough. This screen blows away anything else I’ve seen and is on par with the new screens on the macbook pros. Toss in a dual-core 2.8ghz CPU and 4GB of RAM, and you’ve got the perfect software development laptop.
I got my E6500 with Windows Vista. I know there are plenty of Luddites who still stick with XP because they think it is “faster”, but Vista just rocks. I’m using it for Java development and have installed IntelliJ, MySQL 5.1, Apache HTTPD. All work flawlessly and IntelliJ is beautiful in Aero.
Speaking of a developer laptop, since I just had to do this, I’ll share my “Java on Windows” essential tools list:
- Java 6 JDK
- IntelliJ IDEA 8
- MySQL 5.1
- Subversion 1.5
- Tortoise SVN
- WinSCP
- Putty
- UltraEdit
- SnagIt
- WinZip Pro
- DbVisualizer
- Firefox 3 with Web Developer, Firebug, ColorZilla and Tamper Data add-ons
- Chrome
- Tomcat 6
This is my must-have kit for Java development tools. Yes, some are not free, but they are well worth it. Note that I don’t get into all the libraries. Of course I’m using Spring, JUnit, MySQL Connector/J, etc… This just covers core tools.
Core Tools + E6500 = Happy Java Coder
Catching the 8
The latest version of my favorite Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA 8, was released today. I’ve been using IDEA since version 2.0 and have consistenly upgraded my personal license every new release. This time is no different. IDEA has been my favorite IDE for the simple fact it is the ultimate coders tool. No other IDE I have ever used has been so good at helping me with the things I need while staying out the of way the rest of the time. There is not a better Java development environment on the planet.
Yes, I’m sure I’ve offended the Eclipse mafia. I have used Eclipse, on serveral occassions. But I go back to IDEA every time. It is hard to describe the difference in feel between the two. Eclipse is like a swiss army knife — it does a little bit of everything, but none of it particularly well. IntelliJ IDEA is like a Spyderco knife, the perfect cutting instrument. Eclipse is the Visual Basic to IntelliJ IDEA’s emacs.
So what’s new with IntelliJ IDEA 8? The coolest thing I’ve used so far is the built-in JavaScript debugger. You no longer have to depend on Firebug to debug JavaScript files in a project, you can simply set breakpoints in the JavaScript and run the page. For the full list of the new features, check out this page. I’ll be doing a more in-depth review of IDEA 8, using it with a Spring MVC web project.
If you haven’t tried IntelliJ IDEA, and you’re a Java developer, I strongly encourage you to check it out. Personal licenses are only $249 and they are well worth it. Eclipse may be free, but you get what you pay for.
Day at the Opera
Last weeks big news was the release of Firefox 3.0. But a quieter event happened the Tuesday prior — Opera 9.5 was released. I’m a regular user of Firefox, although Firebug is starting to piss me off. I haven’t used Opera since they experimented with an ad-based model serveral years ago. It was always fast, but felt clunky.
Opera 9.5 is a huge improvement and I was very impressed. The look-and-feel is different from prior versions and was not so wierd as to be uncomfortable. Rendering speed was very fast and JavaScript also is very fast, which was my main interest. They also incorporated a JavaScript development tool similiar to Firebug that is called Dragonfly. Beyond being a clever play on words, Dragonfly provides an integrated, supported tool to handle what I was using Firebug for.
So I suggest taking a look at it. I’ll probably end up using Firefox 3 more often, as I’m a creature of habit, but the folks at Opera Software have done a great job and it is always nice to have another standards-compliant browser to test with.
Drinking from the Fire Hose
I’m about half way through Douglas Crockford’s new book JavaScript: The Good Parts. Crockford is a JavaScript architect and Jedi working at Yahoo!. He also maintains the JSON format and is on the ECMAScript committee. This book is his effort to shine a new light on JavaScript as a serious language in its own right.
The book is a concise 150-ish pages and it is information dense. In fact, it is mind-melting dense. Crockford says up front that it could take serveral readings to really grasp all the concepts and I would absolutely agree. I’ve been playing a lot recently with JavaScript, and thought I was starting to get the hang of it, but this book is like jumping from C++ for Dummies to Modern C++ Design. It leaves my head spinning, but is fascinating at the same time.
This book gets a big thumbs up and I would highly recommend anyone interested in what JavaScript is really about check it out. There are very few truly good books on JavaScript. This book, along with David Flanagan’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide are the best out there and should be the starting points for anyone who decides to make the effort to really understand JavaScript, the real language behind Web 2.0.