rickcarson considers productivity in the "Beyond Java" book club discussion in the Forums. In Re: Chapter 5: Rules of the Game, he writes "the debate about productivity is interesting. Some people measure productivity as 'number of key strokes'. Personally, I find that the number one thing that gets me to the 'finish line' first (on non trivial projects) is not to sit down at thye keyboard and start bashing out code - but to get a pen and paper (or whiteboard) and start working out the high level design. This saves an enormous amount of 'refactoring' later on. Also - an important point (since I can hear the wailing and gnashing of the XP fans already), the design is not set in stone but is flexible - it is flexible in a way that is not possible *unless* you have the big picture. When requirements change you can pick the best place in the design to make the change, rather than just bolting it on as a special case and hoping for the best."

cayhorstmann thinks GlassFish needs useful exception messages: "Just to amplify the point of my previous post: I logged the exception in the source of my bean, and I got this error message: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to retrieve EntityManagerFactory for unitName simple Ok, that gives me something to work with. Why not log the innermost of the nested exceptions instead of the outermost two?"