Rich Unger's Blog

October 2005 Archives

NB Module Suite building tip

    <!-- override run/debug/profile to NOT build all the modules first.
         Saves lots of time, but you need to remember to do a "Build All" in the IDE
         or run the "build" target in the ant script if you really do need to
         build. -->
    <target name="debug" depends="-init" description="Debug vbuilder in NetBeans IDE">
        <ant antfile="${harness.dir}/run.xml" target="debug"/>
    </target>
    <target name="profile" depends="-init" description="Profile vbuilder in NetBeans IDE">
        <ant antfile="${harness.dir}/run.xml" target="profile"/>
    </target>
    <target name="run" depends="-init" description="Run V-Builder">
        <ant antfile="${harness.dir}/run.xml" target="run"/>
    </target>

My wonderful new toy

I would have just commented on Tim's blog entry, but he seems to have commenting turned off.

I, too, am marveling at a nice, shiny, fast ultra 20. (And I, too, didn't pay for it.) I have mine set up in my office, partly to enjoy my coworkers' drooling, and partly because my roommate wouldn't much care for it being on the dining room table :)

I agree with Tim's review. The green LED doesn't bother me so much (that's what electrical tape is for, right?)

I definitely agree with the Solaris comment. I'm a linux user at home, and I had the hardest time with the Solaries userland. Hell, I couldn't even properly create a non-root user! There's no apparent GUI tool for user management, and the adduser command adds a user, but doesn't do the little things, like add a home directory for that user, or do group management, or anything else.

I would *love* a GNU/Solaris. Hell, I would love to see a solaris-kernel package for debian or redhat. That's what it comes down to, right? Now that they're both OSS, there's really nothing to stop competitive distribution and packaging, is there?

In the meantime, I put Fedora on there. I don't actually have a requirement for the solaris kernel (hell, I don't actually have a requirement for the machine at all, it's really just a beautiful toy).

My first order of business is to get project looking glass up on the thing. I'm stalled at the moment, because some of the java library requirements are not available for an amd64 jvm, and not realizing this, I neglected to install the 32-bit jvm instead.

Hey, Sun, how about getting some ultra 20's to the folks developing looking glass? That'd get better amd64 support in a hurry :)

I just ported V-Builder to NetBeans Platform 5.0

A few folks have asked how you move an application from the cluster build harness on 4.x to the 5.0 platform. The way I did it was to create a new module using the IDE, and just copy my source code in. Then use the IDE's facility for adding module dependencies based on what doesn't compile right away. Worked like a charm, except that ClearCase was a PITA about hijacked files (if you're a clearcase user, you know what I'm talking about, and if you're not, feel blessed).

In the entire V-Builder code base of almost 50k lines of java code and around 30 modules, I changed exactly ONE line of java code.

org.netbeans.updater.UpdaterFrame.runFromIDE() added a parameter.

That was it. That, and pulling out my custom build scripts and moving resource files around to conform to the way the apisupport harness expects files to be laid out. It definitely went smoother than expected.

Do you develop NetBeans modules?

We want you.

Okay, that was shameless. I'm sorry. It's also not particularly accurate.

I just got out of a meeting with our recruiter, and I got to wondering about the difference between a recruiter's world view and an engineer's. They have a job requisition to fill, and they look for someone with the precise set of skills required for the job at hand.

In engineering, we'd rather look for a bunch of good coders, and let them move between projects as needed, picking up new skills as they go. At Nuance, I've been on 3 different project teams: a VoiceXML interpreter, a j2ee-based (server-side) tool, and a netbeans-based (client-side) tool. If all I'd ever done was write netbeans modules, I wouldn't have learned enough about server-side programming to work on speech application architecture for V-Builder. If I hadn't worked on the VoiceXML interpreter, I wouldn't have known enough to do a really good job on automatic VoiceXML code generation in V-Builder.

So, if you:

• love to code
• you're good at it
• you think speech recognition sounds kinda cool

...then let me know ... whether or not you've ever written a NetBeans module.

You can reach me at RichUnger (at) netbeans.org

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