Sunday, November 25, 2007

Comparative Study of Commercial Eclipse-based IDEs feedback

I just finished reading the whitepaper, Improving Java Development: A Comparative Study of Commercial Eclipse-based IDEs. It is an interesting read and compares base Eclipse against Code Gear JBuilder, IBM's Rational Application Developer and Genuitec's MyEclipse. The overall results were very favorable to JBuilder which does not surprise me because I was a big fan, user and certified trainer of JBuilder until Eclipse was open sourced. So, I am sure the new JBuilder product built on Eclipse is great too. Unfortunately, I have just not had the time to check it out.

I am a little surprised/disappointed in the white paper though. What it fails to do is make a fair comparison with Eclipse and the commercial tools. It compares base Eclipse with the commercial tools rather than a bundled version such as Europa JEE or Callisto. So, if you are doing Java EE or J2EE development and are still using the base Eclipse, upgrade to Europa JEE. It will provide more of the tools you need for doing enterprise Java development. Even if you are not doing enterprise development, the Web Tools Platform included with Europa JEE includes helpful tools like XML tools that make even standard Java development easier.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Eclipse World 2007 Slides

I just returned from Eclipse World 2007. It was a great conference again this year and it was nice to see so many familiar faces from previous Eclipse World and EclipseCon conferences. Lots of interesting sessions about Eclipse and the Eclipse Ecosystem. I especially enjoyed David "I" Intersimone and Robert Martin's keynotes. Unfortunately
I did not get to attend as many sessions as I would like since I presented a tutorial and 4 regular sessions all covering different aspects of the Web Tools Platform and Data Tools Platform such as EJB 3.0, JSF, Web Services and Facets. You can find my slides and sample code at http://www.juddsolutions.com/ew2007/.

Enterprise Java Development on a Budget Free eBook

Apress is now offering the first book I co-authored with Brian Sam-Bodden, Enterprise Java Development on a Budget, as a free eBook. You can download it from http://www.apress.com/resource/freeebook/9781590591253.

AWS EC2 Hibernate Java SDK v2 Example

I recently wanted to automate the creation of developer VMs in AWS using EC2 instances. To improve the developer experience (DX), I didn'...