Seriously Impressive: Sun Java Studio Creator - Ubuntu's killer app?

[Derek Broughton]

Pete Ryland wrote:

> On 13/12/06, Chanchao <custom at freenet.de> wrote:
>> What acts (finally) in Java's favour is the free tools available. Rapid
>> Development tools.  You can drag and drop a bunch of fields, right-click
>> to bind them to your database table, right click again to specify some
>> user entry validation snippets and click 'run' and it'll pop up in
>> Firefox exactly the way you dragged and dropped the stuff.
> 
> There are so many fallacies in thinking that these RAD tools actually
> help.  Fine, they make a simple thing look simple, but try to do
> anything complicated or maintain the code over any significant period
> of time and you're forced to jump through hoops or end up hacking
> machine-generated code with a text editor anyway.

Baloney.  I'd say that there are so many fallacies in thinking that you can
save any time by hand-hacking code in primitive editors.

> But then the text 
> editors that come with most of these tools barely support
> cut/copy/paste, and pale into comparison with the facilities available
> in emacs or vim.  

No, they don't.  I'll grant that emacs can usually do the same things with
less overhead.

> Why would I want to use a crappy text editor as a 
> trade off for typing myconnection = db.connect("dbname").  And of
> course they don't just do a simple connect to your database; 

Of course, they _do_ if that's what you want.

> they'll 
> automatically analyse your database and create EJBs for each of your
> tables for you to access your data through by a scalable (aka
> serialized) method call. 

And they'll do that if _that's_ what you want.

> Just say no. 

Dinosaur.
 
> My suggestion is to buy a book or print a manual to learn *thoroughly*
> either vim or emacs.

I learned emacs once.  I've progressed thank you.

> BTW, you may also be interested in a very simple-to-use python gui
> library I'm working on which turns methods into buttons.  Having not
> done anything with GTK+ for a few years, I wanted to write some simple
> frontends with PyGTK, and found little improvement in the learning
> curve since GTK1.0.  So I've actually set out to simplify the creating
> of simple GUIs whilst still trying to allow the flexibility that
> people have come to expect.  

So, what you're condemning in all these other IDEs, you're promoting in the
Python gui you've written?  Makes sense, I guess.

> Sorry for the divergence of the topic, and for the pimping, but I
> thought it might be of interest.

It is.  The problem with one-stop IDEs is that they're "one-stop" - they try
to do everything for everybody, thus piling on the overhead.  My search for
the perfect IDE has always been a search for something that can do
everything _I_ want to do while providing as little extra overhead as
possible.  Eclipse seems best to me because reducing overhead is a matter
of not loading extra plugins, but I use multiple IDEs because some of them
do specific things better.

-- 
derek