Blogging Roller

I've been switching around between the Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEs at home and at work. I've found that fiddling around with multiple IDE specific project configurations and launchers and class-paths is no fun at all. That's one of the reasons I got interested in Maven. Yes, Maven is a build-system but it's also a sort of IDE portability solution. Maven projects can be loaded right into all the major Java IDEs as you can see in the screenshots below. IDEs can find your sources, resources, dependencies and via the Maven Jetty plugin even run your Java webapps from the IDE -- things that are not possible if you're using a custom Ant build-script as we were doing before with Roller.

Here some screenshots that show the various Maven IDE plugins and their dependency graph feature.

Here's Roller loaded into Eclipse via the Maven M2 Eclipse plugin.

<img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_gRyDsh__fr0/S5JXdBQRLNI/AAAAAAAAAdE/nlZukqREyjI/s288/e3-roller-maven.png" alt="Roller / Maven Eclipse 3.5 / M2Eclipse" />

By the way, if you want detailed instructions for getting Roller 5 up and running in Eclipse with the Eclipse Web tooling, check-out Harald Wellman's helpful blog on the topic: Setting up Eclipse for Roller.

Here's Roller loaded into Netbeans as a Maven project.

And here's Roller loaded into IDEA IntelliJ as a Maven project.

I'm not sure which I prefer yet.

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When I saw that Tim Bray upgraded to a Netbeans 6 daily-build and it seemed to work OK, I just had to give it a try myself and I'm glad I did. I've been using it for a solid day now and I can tell that it's going to be a vast improvement over 5.5. It's fast. It starts up way faster than 5.5, seems faster overall and shutdown is almost instantaneous. Bravo! What else?

Tim was impressed by the hip new JRuby support, and I'll give that a try, but right now I'm digging the more routine things, things that I've been missing from Eclipse like multi-file search & replace, local history and a smart editor. The only thing I miss from Eclipse now is this: Netbeans has a nice Ctrl-Shft-O to Go To Type feature and I use it all the time; why can't we have a nice slick Ctrl-Shft-R Go To Resource like Eclipse does?

Anyhow... NB6 is looking good already, so if you're using 5.5, you might want to take the latest milestone Netbeans 6.0 M7 or one of the dailies for a spin.

I'm not exactly pleased with the open source Java IDE situation on MacOS. Eclipse 3.0 M8 works and connects to SourceForge CVS/SSH just fine, but it is slow, looks obnoxious, and it just crashed while I was editing a Java source file. I hope that, by the 3.0 release, Eclipse will be usable on MacOS. Next, I tried Netbeans.

Netbeans 3.6 seems fast, fits in with the MacOS GUI, and even recognized the SourceForge CVS/SSH configuration that Eclipse left behind, but... when I attemped to login to CVS, Netbeans showed me a stack-trace. I decided to try using a real cvs client instead of Netbeans built-in implementation. I used Fink to download the cvs command-line client, configured it, and confirmed that it works with SourceForge CVS/SSH by doing an update on the Roller CVS. I configured Netbeans to use the command-line cvs client, but no luck. Netbeans says "Permission denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive)." I have CVS_RSH set in my .bash_profile and in Netbeans CVS environment variables... is there some other trick?

Anybody had any luck connecting to SourceForge CVS/SSH with Netbeans on Mac OSX?

I had to do some grueling work on the Roller persistence layer this weekend, the kind that requires lots of searching, replacing, trial-and-error experimenting, testing, and debugging.  I decided to make the job fun by trying something new: Eclipse.  Normally, I use WinCVS and VIM for my development.  Sometimes I use JBuilder when I need to throw together a quick Swing UI or Netbeans when I need to do some debugging.  Here is the story of my first real experience with Eclipse: