John "jbob" Bobowicz's Blog

Socializing development tools

You may not be able to socialize me (just ask my inlaws or come on my next extended family vacation), but at least socialize my development tools.

Social software is slow to make it's way into development tools. Why is this important? Consider the Java platform. The strength and value of the Java platform is directly derived from collaboration among a community. I would argue that the amount of collaboration is as important as the size of the community, and both are extremely critical.

Yet, as a developer, I typically need to leave my IDE in order to collaborate and communicate with other developers. Isn't this the same as the pre-telephone days when people had to leave our homes to communicate with others? Once telephones became common place in every home, communication increased dramatically. As a developer, I am "at home" in my IDE, yet the ability to communicate hasn't made it into that home yet.

I would suggest that the integration of social software, like weblogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Instant Messangers, etc, into the development environment would increase collaboration among developers.

So, in my ideal world, if I am in my Netbeans IDE and connected to the Internet, and logged into java.net, I should be able to find and collaborate with fellow netbeaners or java.netters without leaving my IDE.

I should be able to set up a buddy list so I am notified when co-conspirators are online. Instead of inviting them to view my web cam (insert bad visual here) I can invite them to view my code (insert bad code here).

Imagine, if while in your IDE, you clicked on "help" and actually got real help (read: Online assistance).

I should be able to set up preferences that will enable people to find me based upon my interests or area of expertise, if I wish. Imagine when clicking on "help", in addition to the normally helpless context sensitive help text, I am also pointed to relevant projects, weblog, forums, projects on java.net. Additionally, if there are members currently online that have advertised relevent experence in their profile, I find out out about them too. It is as that point that when I click on "help", that I actually get help.

Finally, why doesn't my IDE allow for some "Napster like" peer to peer capability. Why do I need to upload my code to some site just to get it published? I should be able to mark a folder or directory shareable and allow people to download whatever I put there at will. It works for MP3's, why not for JARs? The technology is there. Isn't that what JXTA is all about (p2p)? It's been around. So, how come tool vendors aren't using it?

Any saavy marketing person or product manager will tell you that "there is no demand" for these capabilities (that they can measure). So, the flaw with this approach is that innovation often spurs demand and not necessarily the other way around. How many people desperately needed Instant Messaging, email, fax machines or personal computers as compared to the number who today can't live without it. The fax machine and the PC are classic examples of where the capability created the demand . The good news is that major corporations, and especially their marketing people, don't innovate; creative individuals do. Now we just need someone to productize it.

More good news is that all of the technologies needed to accomplish some of the above ideas are available today. As a matter of fact, putting web services, Netbeans, and JXTA in a blender on high speed gets you pretty darn close.

I guess I am hoping that it becomes less noticeable where my IDE ends and my community starts....

So, Java developers are already cool. Their tools would be a whole lot cooler if they were socialized.

-jbob

Comments

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  Any program is incomplete until it can process and generate RSS. Those that can't will be replaced by those that can.

  Its to a certain degree the monolith verses the separate but similar apps question all over again. One person wants a monolith, and Netscape "Communicator" was born. The next says its too big, too heavy, and has too many *features* that I don't need 'cause i already have apps that do that, and Mozilla has the Galeon and Phoenix/Firebird spinoffs.

  I already find the number of features in modern IDEs to be far too cumbersome as it is, and have yet to bring most to bare on any I've worked with (including Eclipse) that I just give up and go back to emacs and javac. Adding yet another set of dialogs and windows to *configure* is just adding yet another hassle. That many of these dialogs (especially in Visual Studio) change significantly on every upgrade, along with the right menu option selection to find the damned thing, just makes it worse.

  I don't want or need kitchen-sink apps. I can have a separate RSS engine and a separate instant messanger engine and not feel I'm "leaving home". Home is my desktop in its entirety, and chaning rooms by alt-tab isn't something that should be considered "uncomfortable". We've had it for over 10 years now.
  

  Posted by: acroyear on September 08, 2003 at 05:22 PM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  I definitely agree that we don't need "kitchen-sink apps" and I shared your thought that we should instead focus on making applications easier to integrate with one another.

  But is RSS the way to do so? Is that even what RSS is intended for? I'll admit I don't follow RSS carefully, but I see that a rift has already been formed among those that do. It seems attempting to apply RSS to something that it perhaps isn't best suited and likely was not intended might stretch RSS further and create a wider rift.

  What might be an interesting concept would be an IDE built around the shared-document concept in the Mac OS X application formerly known as Hydra. The authors themselves used the application to develop the application, in a distributed pair-programming model. O'reilly's MacDevCenter.com has an interview with the authors.

  Posted by: jimothy on September 09, 2003 at 06:14 AM

• [OT] Paragraph breaks
  Completely off-topic, but has anybody been able to predict when including two line breaks (e.g., typing return-return or enter-enter) will result in a blank line between paragraphs in the comments? It seems completely non deterministic to me.

  Posted by: jimothy on September 09, 2003 at 06:16 AM

• [OT] Paragraph breaks
  Enclose your paragraphs in HTML tags ( P and /P ) to acheive this. I believe you can also user the BR tag.

  Posted by: jbob on September 09, 2003 at 07:11 AM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  I wonder why it has to be all or nothing. With all of the "frameworks" and "component models" out there, including Web Services, why can't features be plugable?

  I too tend to use text editors and javac for most of my simpler coding. This is because I don't want a tool to create code for me, I want it to help me manage MY code. The most useful feature in my IDE is reserve word recognition and color coding the text...

  Posted by: jbob on September 09, 2003 at 07:23 AM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  Funny.. While I use emacs all the time as well, it is pretty much the poster child for "kitchen sink" applications, with the most mind-boggling array of configuration options of any tool I've worked with. :-)

  
  

  Posted by: glucas on September 09, 2003 at 09:41 AM

• Keep things Separate
  Why does it seem people want to throw disconnected application concepts together?

  When people want to be able to do something unrelated to a programs functionality "without leaving the program"... WHY?

  Why does my web browser have an IRC client built into it? Why does my email program show me which buddies are online?

  Posted by: jreed on September 09, 2003 at 09:48 AM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  The "RSS" reference was just an example. In particular, it was reflecting the first two paragraphs of the original entry that discussed the integration of weblogs and wikis into it, and RSS can be one of the main tools in such integrations.

  Posted by: acroyear on September 09, 2003 at 10:49 AM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  Yes, but unlike almost all IDEs I've seen, provided one has a handy key-binding chart handy, one can use it out of the box with 0 configuration.

  For even "simple" projects, the tedium involved in setting CLASSPATHS and the like makes just getting a project *started* in JEdit or Eclipse or VS.NET a 4-6 hour project for me. Even letting Ant do all the work, one still needs to have JEdit's classpaths point to the same ones as the ant buildfile you're using, in order to get the best features, making switching between projects a pain.

  Posted by: acroyear on September 09, 2003 at 10:52 AM

• New extension to the Law of Software Envelopment?
  This is a problem I have with Eclipse. It seems to involve too much up front work. Isn't Netbeans better suited to provinding this type of project experience? I use/develop AppDevStudio from SAS which easily allows you to set up a new project in nothing flat.

  On the app integration end of things, I think it would be cool to add IM functionality to the IDE to easily communication with the other members of your group. Not sure how to implement the "go out and ask the world for help" option, though. Talk about community configuration!

  Posted by: sasjaa on September 09, 2003 at 01:00 PM

• Bloating development tools and bothering your buddies
  So, in my ideal world, if I am in my Netbeans IDE and connected to the Internet, and logged into java.net, I should be able to find and collaborate with fellow netbeaners or java.netters without leaving my IDE.

  When my IDE is open, I don't want people to bother me, I want to code.

  Imagine, if while in your IDE, you clicked on "help" and actually got real help (read: Online assistance).

  And who will answer? Every time you press F1 someone's bell will ring, calling for help? Will it be automatically sent to some forum, and wait for an answer? When you make already-answered questions in forums, they say "go to the FAQ, answers for most questions are there". Your ideal world's real help forum would say "It's in the tool's manual, look there".

  I should be able to set up preferences that will enable people to find me based upon my interests or area of expertise, if I wish. Imagine when clicking on "help", in addition to the normally helpless context sensitive help text, I am also pointed to relevant projects, weblog, forums, projects on java.net.

  Nowadays, web search engines are less helpful than years ago, because of the large amount of information they have to handle, and because of the freedom that Internet provides (anyone can publish any junk they want, at no cost).

  Too many fake-broken-unrelated links just make it even harder to find something that worths the time looking for it. If when you press F1, the tool searches google/altavista/java.net/etc for help, you will end up wasting your day just browsing the "help-search" results, looking for an answer that might be in your embeded help file. Try F1, then try google, if nothing works, go and do it yourself.

  Finally, why doesn't my IDE allow for some "Napster like" peer to peer capability. Why do I need to upload my code to some site just to get it published? I should be able to mark a folder or directory shareable and allow people to download whatever I put there at will. It works for MP3's, why not for JARs? The technology is there. Isn't that what JXTA is all about (p2p)? It's been around. So, how come tool vendors aren't using it?

  Well, you may share your jars with eDonkey, I just think it won't be very useful. :)

  Code is nothing but meaningless symbols, if you don't have some documentation about what it does. Would you be interested in downloading, say, foo.jar from the Internet and running it in you computer? Sun developed something like this some time ago, in a secure way. Downloading jar files from the Internet and running them safely. er... applets, I suppose. But I don't see anyone looking for "foo.jar" at google, either.

  I may be wrong, of course, and you may be a visionary. But what I think is that both posts (yours AND mine) are just products of the Internet's freedom I mentioned above... :-)

  Posted by: ronaldtm on September 09, 2003 at 01:04 PM

• [OT] Paragraph breaks
  Actually, it is not necessary to enter <p> or <br /> tags. There were some spacing issues but we've managed to fix those - thanks for pointing them out! Limited html tags are optional.

  -sarah
  java.net Producer

  Posted by: sarahb on September 09, 2003 at 04:26 PM

• [OT] Paragraph breaks
  Thanks! Good work. It might seem like a trivial matter to some folks, but I appreciate the attention to detail. And look! The line breaks in my previously entered comments are fixed!

  Posted by: jimothy on September 10, 2003 at 05:56 AM

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