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Old habits

Posted by daniel on February 4, 2005 at 7:54 AM EST

Keyboard shortcuts lead to lock-in

Once you get used to keyboard shortcuts, it can feel awkward to switch. In IDE lockdown - give my Java back, Kirill Grouchnikov compares the keyboard combinations he uses most in today's Weblogs . He suggests " Maybe we need a JSR for the key bindings. I won't even go into creating my own keymaps or choosing one of the predefined keymaps that simulate the rival IDEs. If they are there, why won't you just stick with them? The people will not choose the IDE because of the keymaps, they will only be more than happy to know that they can revert to your IDE without the need to learn new keymap set."

Tim Boudreau blogs about his cross country trip in NetBeans on the Road. He makes an interesting, and to me surprising point, about developers not working on J2ME apps because of the complexity. As he tells it, he asked an audience of around one hundred people " 'How many of you have ever developed a J2ME app?' Three people raised their hands. 'Okay, how many of you would try it if it were really easy?' Everybody raised their hands." He says that the NetBeans Mobility Pack makes developing J2ME apps easy.

In Also in Java Today , we feature Oliver Steele's article on The IDE Divide as it sparked Kirill Grouchnikov's response, Steele begins his essay with "The developer world is divided into two camps. Language mavens wax rhapsodic about the power of higher-level programming — first-class functions, staged programming, AOP, MOPs, and reflection. Tool mavens are skilled at the use of integrated build and debug tools, integrated documentation, code completion, refactoring, and code comprehension."

In QuickTime for Java Components, an excerpt from Chris Adamson's book QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook, you'll learn about QuickTime's remarkably flexible system of "components", sharable code fragments that can be discovered at runtime and which provide much of the framework's power. Focusing on import and export components, it shows how different graphic and audio/video formats can be read and written from Java, and how you can discover new components installed long after your application's release (such as by an update to QuickTime or third-party extensions installed by the user).

In Projects and Communities, what is the best way to Test Web Applications? The JavaPedia page lists ten open source and one commercial product including Canoo, Cactus, and HttpUnit. Add your favorites to the list along with your comments.

The Java BluePrints Team has updated the Java BluePrints website. This release enables the online viewing of design details for each solution entry alongwith the design topics. After browsing some of the online topics covered, you can download the bpcatalog project.

Kelly O'Hair provides two answers in today's Forums. First, with respect to Debugging JNI exception failures he writes "There is a -verbose:jni but I'm not sure how worthwhile it is. The JVM TI interface allows you to do full JNI interception, and I've wanted to try that, but have not been able to find the time. It might make a good JVM TI demo, and also provide some help with JNI issues. The native tools (debuggers or truss or strace) could then be used to watch/trace your JNI interceptions."

He also answers a question on Building J2SE. "Try setting DEPLOY= (empty) and you probably want to do a BUILD_INSTALL=false. e.g.cd control/make; gnumake DEPLOY= BUILD_INSTALL=falseThe deploy area is the one that has the plugin.Or you might be able to just 'mv deploy deploy-', but I haven't tried that."

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Keyboard shortcuts lead to lock-in
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