chris clarke

Eclipse vs. IntelliJ : Final Showdown (sort of)

Having used both Eclipse and IntelliJ for a while now - I’ve decided to have my own showdown between the two IDEs. Similar to JK, I’ll be recording every fault, brilliance, missing feature, annoyance and crash in this blog entry. After a month or two of using both - I’ll decide which one has further to go to become King of all Java IDEs.

I’ve gravitated between the two of them for a while and I’m probably one of the few who’s yet to make their mind up. Rather than knee-jerking between the two I’ll also be looking for ways around things, and seeing exactly how hard it would be to just dig in and code a plugin for “But (Eclipse/IntelliJ) doesn’t have feature X”.

• No HTML editor in eclipse - easily solved, installed webtools.
• No widen selection (Apple-w) in eclipse - not a big thing but a feature that you get really used to in IntelliJ
• Lack of an easy way to create a test in IntelliJ - solved by downloading the Test Dox plugin (available from the IntelliJ Plugin Repository) - now I just hit Alt-Shift-T on a class and it takes me to the corresponding test, or offers to create one in the absence of an existing test.

Self-deleting script accident

I was working on a build which kept generating loads of files but not cleaning them afterwards. This was causing tests to fail because of stuff hanging around between builds.
So, I wrote a script which deletes files that are local and not in the Subversion repository.

#!/bin/bash

echo Deleting all local files not in Subversion repository:
echo
svn st | grep ? | awk '{ print "deleting... " $2; }'
echo
svn st | grep ? | awk '{print $2; }' | xargs rm -rf
echo Remaining differences to repository:
echo
svn st

Only problem was, because the script was not added to Subversion - it deleted itself.

Building Circles with Googles Rounded Corners

Continuous Deployment

As a developer I want a continuous deployment server that grabs every successful build from my continuous integration server, deploys it and tests that its been deployed correctly. Then when it comes to the end of an iteration, I can use the last successful deployment and just switch it over to live.

Cool ideas

Found a few cool ideas following rachel’s blog, including silly hats for broken build. Also, liked the use of a status, such as ‘In Progress’ or ‘Customer Preview’ for each story on planning boards.

Having a further look around I found a fellow James-Shore-fan, who had come up with a interesting idea to be used at the end of a retrospective - a ROTI (Return On Time Invested) histogram.