Shey’s Rebellion

I’ve complained about the Java Date API classes before, it’s complicated,difficult to use and the calender class makes accessing methods clunky and well, verbose.

Last week I found Joda-Time, a replacement for the Java Date/Time classes. I played around with it for a week and found Joda-Time has great support for Time Zones and Time Periods which is super handy and easier to read than the JDK classes; it makes it easy to find some date plus/minus a time period, no more mucking around with the Calendar class or TimeZone classes.

Here’s a small example of what Joda-Time can do:

//JDK, adding 15 years to a date
Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance();
rightNow.add(Calendar.YEAR, 15);
Date javaDate = rightNow.getTime();
System.out.println(javaDate.toString());

//Joda Time, adding 15 years to a date
DateTime jodaDate = new DateTime().plusYears(15);
System.out.println(jodaDate.toString());

//Joda Time, changing timezone
DateTime newDate = jodaDate.withZone(DateTimeZone.forID(”US/Eastern”));
System.out.println(newDate.toString());
Play around with Joda-Time and decide for yourself.

Interested in high traffic RoR web sites?  Read how Robot Co-op’s setup handles 2.5 million hits per day and GreatSchools’ setup handles ~1 Million page views per day.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus.

Eclipse is my best friend right now, I think I’ve said that before, if I change my mind, don’t be surprised, I’m always looking for ways to make software development easier. I like having all my tools in one place, it makes me more productive; for my RoR adventures I’ve been using Eclipse with the Ruby Development Tools, RadRails and Subclipse plug-in.

Eclipse/RDT gives me easy access to my all my unit tests and a nice graphical interface, source control, I never have to leave the IDE and RadRails is the BEST IDE for RoR development, nothing comes close. I wish Eclipse was more responsive, you can never have enough RAM for Eclipse, but I can’t complain too much. It’s been a much better experience than Jedit and FreeRIDE, although, I still pop open Notepad++ and a console window and hack out some Ruby code every couple of days

This sounds like a giant Ruby commercial, but there’s more to it than the hype. Software development has come a long way for me from the ‘old’ days (~2002) when I programmed in C++ with KDevelop, when my tools were always getting in my way. KDevelop wasn’t very user friendly, neither is C++ or make, now I don’t spend as much time wrangling with my tools. Things just feel easier.

I still miss Intellisense.

Java SE 6 is out and SUN has given me a reason to upgrade! Web Services deployment has been simplified using Endpoint, you no longer need to write deployment descriptors and start containers, this is the super quick prototyping that Microsoft .NET developers have enjoyed for years!

Speaking of .NET, it seems more and more unlikely that I will invest a lot of my time as a developer learning “.NET 3.0.”

I love developing with the .NET framework and Visual Studio but Microsoft has tied .NET’s fate to Vista and hasn’t given me any reason to believe Vista will be a “success.” I also imagine the cost of development, i.e. licenses and hardware, will be much greater than before, couple this with the great new platforms available and the trend towards developing web applications, Microsoft technologies just don’t look as profitable.

Finally, I’ve played around with Ruby on Rails quiet a bit this past month, working with it has been really enjoyable. I can’t say anything new about RoR but I want to mention that I really prefer Rails’ “convention over configuration” methodology, most of the conventions are intuitive and they save me from writing the same configuration files over and over again.
Till next time.

If you’ve had trouble understanding Ruby’s Blocks and Proc constructs here’s a good tutorial by Eli Bendersky that helped me get a better handle on them.

Last night I installed SQL Server 2005  and I thought to myself there hasn’t been much press about SQL Server 2005 since its release.  Maybe its because I’ve been into Ruby development lately, but, today I read there hasn’t been a single security flaw reported for SQL Server, no wonder I haven’t heard anything.
Awesome!