Jack Shirazi's Blog

JavaOne Archives

Java IDE comparison

There is a "Java IDE shootout" from JavaOne 2004 at here (the pdf is available free and fairly detailed). It presents an overview comparison of IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs and JDeveloper

Please understand, this is for your information not to start any IDE wars. I'm sure you each have your own favorite IDE, and some of you will prefer to die defending it rather than admit there is any viable alternative.

Personally I have to be IDE agnostic because I have to use whatever my customers are using - though surprisingly often now there is a choice. It used to be that when I went consulting, a site would have mandated one IDE, and there was a big process which they went through to select that IDE (you could tell because it left visible scars on some developers). Nowadays, almost every site I get to has no mandated Java IDE, instead you can choose one from a list - or whatever you want in some cases - as long as you can integrate it into the existing development process.

I went to a lot of different sites over the years. It used to be the emacs IDE guys who were the loudest about how great their IDE was. Nowadays it is the IntelliJ guys. And I do mean guys, none of the female developers I met used to spout on about her IDE being the best.

Java Case Studies

I love looking through case studies. They can teach you so much about what to do, what not to do, what is in vogue, etc. All those useful design patterns came from analyzing lots of case studies and seeing what worked; and sometimes, more importantly, what didn't work.

So this year I decided to start listing case studies when I find them. And a great place to start is JavaOne, where lots of the really big case studies get presented. So here they are. The highlights for me: eBay architected for 1 billion page views a day; The Brazilian National Health handling 100 million outpatient procedues a month; 24 million Java Cards used by Taiwan Health Insurance; Capital One Financial handling 80 million transactions each month.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/1477.pdf

• Credit Suisse: bank order routing system (no stats).
• Ford Motor Credit: Enterprise infrastructure. J2EE gave 50% faster development.
• Print PCS: Network and wireless services. Services accessible 5 times faster.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/2165.pdf

• Campbell Soup: HR portal. 300 concurrent users with 19ms response times.
• Dominion Power: Trading system. 90-TIMES reduction in network requests.
• State of Virginia: Caches majority of data. 500 concurrent users with 22ms response times.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/2186.pdf

• Speech synthesis comparison of existing C product (Flite) and Java implementation (FreeTTS): Before performance tuning Java takes twice as long as C; after performance tuning Java takes one third as long as C and has better horizontal scalability.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/2680.pdf

• Brazilian National Health: 100 million outpatient procedures per month.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/2862.pdf

• DaimlerChrysler: Business purchase systems (no stats).

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/2882.pdf

• U.S. Department of Defense: 4.3 million Java Cards, all active duty military personnel.
• Taiwan Health Insurance: 10 million Java Cards in use (24 million target).
• Financial Services: VISA; Citibank; AMEX; Target; all issuing Java Cards.
• Belgium National ID: 11 Java cards
• Many more organizations listed, companywide and national.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/3014.pdf

• Miller Time network (no stats).

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/3054.pdf

• Capital One Financial: Account servicing application. 47 million accounts; 80 million transactions/month; peak 23 000 sessions in half an hour; growing rapidly; must comply with legal requirements.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/3264.pdf

• eBay: 69 million usrs; 380 million page views per day; 1 billion per day expected within 2 years.

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/3284.pdf

• AA.com (American Airlines): Travel commerce. 44 million users; 2 million transactions/day;

http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/3588.pdf

• WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal online): Content presentation. Millions of page views per day; integrated access across multiple domains.

JavaOne programming puzzlers

I've been going through the published slides from the JavaOne presentations, and I've already extracted the majority of the performance tips (here and here ).

But there are other sessions that are interesting too, and one of those is on programming puzzlers. This is a really fun session, but if you (like me) didn't get to attend you don't have to miss out. The slides at http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/resources/content/sf2003/conf/sessions/pdfs/1496.pdf are completely understandable, and well worth looking at whatever your level of Java. Only the most eagle-eyed and knowledgeable programmer is going to get through all ten puzzlers without getting caught out, so if you want to get 10 out of 10, you need to carefully read and understand every single bit of code before guessing answers. This is compulsive for the geeks in us all.

(One little bit of context. For the real-life presentation Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter wear Sun-logoed overalls and play "Click and Hack, the Type-It Brothers." This may help you to understand the last slide in the PDF presentation).

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