Just a simple question:
Would you prefer IntelliJ? If so, what are the Pro- and Cons?
Thx
I'd prefer IntelliJ for any Java project. I'll also point out that ReSharper is a Visual Studio plug-in that provides a lot of the same niceties for .NET. It's also written by JetBrains.
Pros:
Smartest IDE I know. Everything works together. It's not a Frankenstein monster stitched together from disparate plug-ins that don't know about each other.
Best Spring support.
Keeps getting better with every release.
Great integration with SVN, databases, Java EE app servers.
Local and remote debugging with Java EE app servers.
Cons:
Not free. If that puts you off, IntelliJ isn't for you.
Swing UI support isn't the best, but I'm not much of a Swing/desktop developer.
Not Eclipse. If you're a dyed in the wool Eclipse lover you may not like IntelliJ.
I used Eclipse for many years. I liked it and felt grateful to have something so good when my employer wouldn't lay out any money for tools.
Then I changed jobs and was given IntelliJ. I've never gone back. I buy a personal license every year with my own money so I can use it at home and at work. It's an essential tool for me.
In the software projects that I participate developers use either Eclipse or IntelliJ, simply because they are used to either one of them. No one of my collegues switched the IDE yet, so there does not seem to be a "killer application/feature".
I heard that NetBeans is better than Eclipse, especially NetBeans is supposed to be more stable with regard to plugins - this is the only aspect of Eclipse that really troubles me: You either do not find a plugin that you need (I'm still looking for a Maven plugin that actually works) or installing one plugin breaks another.
Related
I am going to develop my first application (4 members team).I am not aware of source control tool ( Visual
source safe,Tortoise SVN).
My .NET version is 3.5. What is the best source control tool ?
Is CruiseControl a source control tool ?
Definitely avoid Visual Source Safe.
Subversion is probably a safe choice, but you will have to elaborate about your situation (E.g. how big is your team?) to get more specific advice.
Another no vote for Visual Source Safe here.
Might be an idea to get familiar with subversion as - just as others mentioned - it's widely adopted, so might be useful in the future and simply works..oh and it's free too!
TortoiseSVN integrates into the windows explorer and is both easy to use and well documented so I would give it a try.
If it's a small project of yours and you don't want to worry about hosting, I would recommend signing up for a free account at something like beanstalk, to keep it safe, without any hassle.
But if it's your first ever project, it might just give you too many additional things to learn about, so you might want to put it aside for a while.
Try GIT, it's much lighter weight than svn
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gitextensions/
you can use a local repository for just checking in your own work (to keep a history, or to keep a working version before changing everything) Or you can connect to a central repository for enterprise source control.
The company where I work used to use the SVN, Tortoise, Ankh stack but we're using Git now. Plus I use it at home on my on play projects.
(quated part is no more important since you edited your post about team size)
If you are doing some small project on
your own, maybe you shouldn't use code
versioning at all because you probably
don't need it. Code versioning helps
you with central code storage,
multi-person development code merging
(several people working on the same
file and then commit changes) and code
branching to name the most important
ones.
If I were you, and I would be the only
person developing something simple, I
wouldn't use it, because it would also
be a bit of a time-overkill.
But otherwise source control doesn't address technology like .Net framework version. Code control only stores files (with history) and is able to merge text files. Written in whatever language possible.
If you are part of a team I'd suggest using Subversion + TortoiseSVN + AnkhSVN
And No, CruiseControl is not a code versioning system. It's a continuous integration system.
If you have a pure Windows environment then VisualSVN server is a Windows version of SVN server and installs easily and cleanly. You can setup security using Windows usernames and passwords, or SVN usernames and passwords.
You can then use Tortoise to provide integration in Explorer and VisualSVN to provide Visual Studio integration (there's a small cost for VisualSVN) or you could try AnkhSVN if all you want is VS integration and don't want to spend any money. Personally I prefer VisualSVN's integration.
Running a GIT server under Windows is, umm, frankly a pain in the ass, and not a route I'd recommend for beginners. VS integration is also fraught with pain.
As with everyone else I'd say avoid SourceSafe like the plague.
CruiseControl is not a source control system, it's an automated build server. It monitors source control servers looking for changes, then checks everything out, compiles it and runs it through your unit tests, so people know if they've broken the build. Once you have source control up and running it's the next big step towards a better build environment.
Before we start talking about source control, I would like you to consider your actual need for it, if this is to be your first .NET application. Is this your actual first attempt of writing some .NET 3.5 code? If so, I doubt that you need to worry about source control just yet. I would say it's not just a little bit overkill for the first learning projects.
On the other hand, if this is to be your first application that you'll actually sell to someone, it's a completely different matter.
I currently use VisualSVN, an add-in to Visual Studio that lets you do check-in, check-out etc from within the environment. Along with it, I use the free SVN repository service at XP-Dev. It works well for me =)
Your choice of a versioning system does not have to do anything with the .NET version you are using.
I'd vote for Subversion / Tortoise SVN. It's rock-solid, has lots of handy features, widely adopted and free.
I work in Visual Studio working on sites mostly myself and occasionally I start on new features for a site and bam a bug pops up on the live site and now I am in the middle of changes and can't post a fix to the bug until everything I started to change is complete.
So I am looking for a nice an simple way to work with this type of situation - any suggestions?
Are you asking for a recommendation of a source control system? SourceGear Vault is free for single users.
I am big fan of subversion. There also plugins for VS to work with subversion repository.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/
I am in a similar situation and I use Perforce. It is free for up to two users and integrates well with Visual Studio.
Subversion is well supported and has tools for most any environment. It's also mostly straightforward to use, so you should be able to get up and running quickly.
If you need to work on a lot of separate features and bugs at the same time, you might try Mercurial instead. The tooling support is a lot less mature but I find the distributed design to do a better job of merging and facilitating work on separate issues concurrently.
But really, if you aren't using anything currently and aren't sure what your needs are, just choose one that has support in the IDE/tools you use. It will probably be Subversion.
I'm starting a new project using Flex3 for a reasonably intricate UI getting its data from a collection of RESTful web services. I wondering what experiences others have had in structuring a moderately complex Flex project. The issues I'm thinking about include:
I want to use our FlexBuilder licenses for visual editing of layouts and debugging code on Eclipse
automated build script so that we can use a CI server
testing strategies, particularly automatable unit tests
cross-platform Linux and Windows development environments (yes, I know the Linux version of FlexBuilder doesn't do visual editing, but everything else should ideally run cross-platform)
dependency management for at least the Java code (are there library dependency managers for Flex?)
I've just burned a day trying and failing to get a maven2/flex/jetty build setup working smoothly (based on Jeff Maury's tutorial). I'm not dead-against using Maven as we go forwards, but I'm sure there must be a less painful route. The main issue I had (other than maven documentation being patchy) is that maven's "single artifact per build" rule means that you have to jump through a lot of hoops with a complex build, and I'm not enough of a maven initiate not to trip over the hoops and fall on my face!
Would Ant and Ivy be a better option than maven2? What other choices are there?
I don't know Flex development but I know CI so I'll comment on that aspect.
I work on CruiseControl, so that's what I use (when not being paid to setup something else). And there are blog entries that describe setting up Flex projects under CC for both Windows and Linux. CC has been around for a long time so there is a large community of users and lots of 3rd party tools that work with it.
But other people are likely to recommend Hudson and it would be hard to argue against them. Hudson is very easy to get up and running and has a nice web based UI. This project is very active, has lots of fans and lots of buzz and has matured very rapidly. I don't have anything bad to say about it. This blog entry describes running acceptance tests under Hudson.
I don't know enough about Maven to offer advice there but I'm working with Ivy at a client right now and I really like it. We've got a combination of Java and C++ code and we're able to get Ivy to do what we need.
Well we are using maven. With some help of a lot of different web sties I have an enterprise application being built using maven.
This article via adobe has really help a lot.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt1.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt2.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt3.html
You really need a common configuration project that will be shared between both flex and java, and possibly your c++ code. This article explains how to set that all up.
Down side, if you are not knowledgeable with maven there is a slight learning curve.
I have created a desktop app and now I need to install in on a client's computer.
However, the client would like to have a wizard to install. Like Visual Studio setup project allows you to add an installer.
Does Qt allow you to create an installer or do I need to use a 3rd party installer like InstallShield or Wise?
You should use the Qt Installer Framework :
http://doc.qt.io/qtinstallerframework/ifw-overview.html
I use Inno and like it a lot. I've tried a few others and this one worked well for me. (and free)
You definitely need a third party installer. A few good ones have already been mentioned. If you decide to go with a paid solution bitrock's installer is a perfect choice and they are also Qt centric and their main business is around Qt.
As an open source alternative I would suggest NSIS
If you only target Windows, you can use WiX (Windows Installer XML), which can be integrated into Visual Studio and MSBuild, so relatively easy to use. It's free and produces valid MSI files, which may be a requirement anyway.
If you rather need a simple wizard setup, give InnoSetup a try.
I think better to use a third party software like installshield. They are optimized for the packaging purpose and provide much customizable options.
If you have Visual Studio already, you can continue to use a setup project to distribute your application. The tools are built in. This is the technology that WiX "replaced" (more on that later), and it's what I do. It's not an ideal solution, but it gets me an MSI, which is how Windows software should be installed these days. Using InstallShield or something might be better, but to be honest I've never had a good experience with any third party installers. This is why I just stuck with the less-than-ideal setup project; it beats spending a lot on expensive, ugly and often frustrating third party installer creation tools. In short, it's a very pragmatic solution, and pragmatic solutions make sense.
As for WiX: I really don't recommend it at all. It seems like a great idea, but after a few months I found myself switching back to the setup projects. Even though he's been using WiX for a year more than I have been using setup projects, our WiX expert takes twice as long to get anything done. (He's a terrific programmer, too, just a bit blinded by open source.) You end up with thousands of copied text lines that you need to maintain. With a couple different projects, it becomes an unmaintainable mess.
I would not suggest attempting to build an installer in Qt yourself. In addition to having to get a lot of behavior just right, as a Qt application it will require the Qt libraries. Unless you statically link them, which is possible with the commercial edition (not LGPL) but difficult and not recommended. Plus then you'd be including two copies of the Qt libraries in your download.
Qt itself seems to use the nullsoft installer. That alone should tell you building your own is not a good idea. :)
Is it realistic to try and learn and code a Flex 3 application without purchasing FlexBuilder? Since the SDK and BlazeDS are open source, it seems technically possible to develop without Flex Builder, but how realistic is it.
I would like to test out Flex but don't want to get into a situation where I am dependent on the purchase of FlexBuilder (at least not until I am confident and competent enough with the technology to recommend purchase to my employer).
I am experimenting right now, so I'm taking a long time and the trial license on my Windows machine has expired. Also Linux is my primary development platform and there is only an alpha available for Linux.
Most of the documentation I've found seem to use Flex Builder.
Maybe I should use Laszlo...
IntelliJ IDEA works as a Flex IDE, if you happen to also be a Java developer. It's free if you contribute to open source projects.
Check out FlashDevelop for Windows. I like it better than Flex Builder.
I've been using Flex since version 2 and Flex3/BlazeDS since it came out of beta. I also have some experience with Lazzlo and the difference is day and night (Flex rocks!). I have not regretted once using Flex. Regarding FlexBuilder, it is worth every penny. While it is completely possible and reasonable to write Flex application without FlexBuilder, the productivity gains of using it will more than recoup the investment. Try the evaluation for 30 days and compare it to some of the other options suggested about (I'm going to try FlashDevelop).
Some things you get with FlexBuilder include:
Code completion
Visual editor
Debugger (it is fantastic!!)
Profiler (also very good)
Regarding Linux, the alpha version of FlexBuilder does not have a visual editor. Other than that, I understand it is reasonably feature complete, still free, and many of the Adobe employees I've talked with that use Linux are happy with it.
FlashDevelop is really easy to setup with the Flex SDK. Just download FlashDevelop, then download the Flex SDK. In FlashDevelop go to Tools > Program Options > AS3Context (under Plugins) > Set the "Flex SDK Location" to the root of the folder you extracted the SDK to and build away. FlashDevelop even has a basic MXML project that will get you going.
If you use ColdFusion for the backend, having FlexBuilder in Eclipse and CFEclipse can mean one less IDE to have to get familiar with.
I'm going to join the choir here and say FlashDevelop for an alternative. The only reasons you might want FlexBuilder are:
Flex charts
Step-through debugging.
Profiler (I haven't used it)
Visual style editor
However, the code-completion and general bloody-awesomeness of FlashDevelop's code-completion and syntax highlighting knocks the gimpy eclipse crap out of the water. So, pretty much what Todd said, except for the code-completion part. Flex Builder is very flakey in that department.
Short answer: Yes
I'm working on a team of developers and designers. We code our .MXML and .AS in FlashDevelop 3 and our designer creates .FLA with skins and widgets that get [Import()]ed in ActionScript.
I wrote a little more about this subject here:
Flash designer/coder collaboration best practices
I have been using FlashDevelop for along time (4/5 years), I am actively using it to develop Flex4.5 applications, it has built in support for code completion, it has a profiler and a debugger that work excellently. The IDE itself is responsive and require the .Net framework, in fact here, I'll list some stuff.
FlashDevelop Pros
Free IDE
Code completion feature
Very capable Debugger
Profiler
Documenting
Ability to build Air / Flex files
Templating
Plugins
FlashDevelop Cons
Lack of UI desing support
.Net support only (Won't work with Mono)
Everything else is pretty simple to get running with, the instructions are available at http://www.flashdevelop.org/
Absolutely. I've been a Flex developer since Flex 2 and until recently I've used my regular editor, TextMate, for coding and Ant for building. TextMate has some good extensions for ActionScript and Flex coding, but I think you could get that for any decent editor.
What's been missing from my setup is a usable debugger, the command line version is a pain to work with. Because of that I've been starting to use FlexBuilder on the side, using it in parallel with my regular setup.
Having a profiler doesn't hurt too.
I've been using FlexBuilder for awhile now and just started to switch to using Eclipse with Flex SDK. I work for a non-profit so the word FREE is huge.
Initially, it is fairly intimidating so if you have the money, you might want FlexBuilder.
There is a lot you need to know and do if you use the SDK. The learning and experience may pay off though... I am still undecided myself.
I second FlashDevelop. You don't get the visual design stuff for the MXML, but for the code (both MXML and AS) it's excellent.
I also use FlashDevelop when working on AS3 projects. For me, the ugliness (UI design) and sluggishness of Eclipse/Flex Builder is enough of a deterrent to stay away from Flex Builder.
In addition to the weaknesses of FlashDevelop pointed out previously, one of my biggest gripes is that it is not a true .NET only app and therefore will never work in mono and therefore can not be easily ported to the mac - which is my platform of choice for development web/javascript/AS3 development.
Amethyst is also a pretty good option to try. It is a plugin for MS Visual Studio, and takes advantage of a lot of the goodies there. It is significantly less sluggish than FlashBuilder, has a really good debugger, and a decent visual designer as well.
The personal version is free, but quite crippled. You have to buy the pro version after a 60 day free trial. However, it is (at time of writing) almost 1/3 the cost of Flash Builder.
As an added bonus you don't need to pay for Visual Studio since it works with the free (albeit hard to find) "shell version (integrated)" of Visual Studio. It won't work with any of the free Express editions, though.