Activity of Aug. 19, 2010

Post date: Aug 19, 2010 1:14:34 AM

The warm-up has returned today.

We are working on Project 2 today and discussing study strategies for tomorrow's quiz.

Food for Thought

In the SD Times newspaper of August 15, 2010, Andrew Binstock pleads, "Gimme better tools, please." Notepad++ can be difficult to configure for Java, but it does have a enviable simplicity. Here's what he says:

Designed to make hard things easier, IDEs now make easy things hard. Just try to pop open an editor, type in some code, and do a quick compile-and-run cycle. This is impossible today.

I am presently in the middle of a five-way review of Java IDEs. They all require more or less this sequence of steps: Create a project, determine the type of project to create (Java desktop, Java EE, JSP, etc.), create a directory structure that matches the project namespace, identify where compiled classes go, then finally create the file. The result is that quick, exploratory programming is not supported. It should be.

This is your chance to explore.