Code IDE

At work we use WSAD, IBM’s version of Eclipse.

Its a very cool, free IDE (Integrated Development Environment) we use for coding Java with.

I plan on using Eclipse at home on my personal projects. It also has a Perl plug-in so I can use it to update MovableType. (Probably has support for other languages, but those are the ones I use the most).

While the tool is very cool, myself and a few other co-workers end up spending a LOT of extra time trying to fix errors in it instead of doing things we should be doing.

Today I updated all my code on my hard drive and now I can’t run any tests. I fixed the first problem, which made no sense, but the NullPointException I’m getting now is a mystery. Fixing the problem is not a high priority because the cause is likely in a temporary class we created because we are not integrated with the security team (so we made a stub).

One thing we always struggle with is: How to code and test. Before people would code in a text editor and send it to a test server (that was shared by everyone on the team). This was horrible because your changes could cause other people to have problems. Finding your error messages mixed in with everyone else’s messages was a pain! However, there was only 1 server to support.

After this we got Visual Age from IBM. Its was pretty cool as you could run JSPs and Java code, but itself didn’t support JSPs nor did it support EJBs so it was VERY limiting. After we got used to it, we changed to WSAD.

With WSAD, we all have our own development environment, but we all have to support it. Can’t win, can we?