Raible Designs

Why I prefer IntelliJ IDEA over Eclipse

Over the last couple months, I've received a few emails asking why I prefer IntelliJ IDEA over Eclipse. They usually go something like this:

I keep seeing you recommending IntelliJ. I keep trying it intermittently with using Eclipse, but I feel like I'm missing something obvious that makes so many people think it's better. Granted having the usual plugins incorporated is nice, but other things like the build process and debugger sometimes seems a step back from Eclipse. Could you please blog a '10 reasons why I love IntelliJ' or point me to something that would clue me in?

I grew to love IntelliJ for a few reasons. It all started in 2006 when I decided to migrate AppFuse from Ant to Maven. Before that, I was a huge Eclipse fan (2002 - 2006). Before Eclipse, I used HomeSite, an HTML Editor to write all my Java code (1999-2002). Eclipse was the first IDE that didn't hog all my system's memory and was pleasant to work with.

The reason I started using IntelliJ in 2006 was because of it's multi-module Maven support. Eclipse's Maven support was terrible, and m2e hasn't gotten a whole lot better in recent years AFAIK.

Back then, I used to think everything should be built and run from the command line. A couple years later, I realized it was better to run tests and debug from an IDE. Now I'm more concerned with the ability to run tests and debug in an IDE than I am from the build system.

In 2009, I started doing a lot more front-end work: writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I also started digging into alternate languages for these: Jade, GWT, CoffeeScript, LESS, SASS - even Scala. I found IntelliJ's support, and plugins, to be outstanding for these languages and really enjoyed how it would tell me I had invalid JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

My original passion in software was HTML and JavaScript and I found that hasn't changed in the last 15 years. AFAIK, Eclipse still has terrible web tools support; it excels at Java (and possibly C++ support). Even today, I write most of my HTML code (for InfoQ and this blog) in IntelliJ.

In reality, it probably doesn't matter which IDE you use, as long as you're productive with it. Once you learn one IDE well, the way others do things will likely seem backwards. I'm so familiar with debugging in IntelliJ, that when I tried to use Eclipse's debugger a few weeks ago, it seemed backwards to me.

In a nutshell: the technologies I've worked with have been better embraced by IntelliJ. Has this happened to you? Have certain technologies caused you to use one IDE over another?

Rafting the Yampa through Dinosaur National Monument

In January, my friend Brice sent out an email to a bunch of folks asking us to apply for a river permit lottery. He sent us links to lotteries for Dinosaur National Monument - Yampa River and Desolation Gray - Green River. There were 10 of us on the email and we all applied for both permits. In mid-February, I found out I won the Yampa permit and the trip planning began. This was a huge deal for some since they'd been trying to get this permit for 10 years.

When we got all the details worked out, we were scheduled to launch on Saturday, May 31 and take out on Wednesday, June 4. Our put-in was Deerlodge Park and take-out, Split Mountain. If you're interested, you can see a map.

Over the next four months, many emails flew between us (33 pages if printed out) and much planning ensued. We had a planning BBQ, endured a permit-award-never-sent-fiasco and I tried to back out for Abbie's 5th grade continuation ceremony. Since I was the permit holder (and had to go), the crew convinced me it was a trip of a lifetime. We left Abbie in Denver for her ceremony and took Jack with us. When we launched on May 31, we had 21 people, 8 rafts and one inflatable kayak. Of the crew, 6 were children (aged 6 - 11).

Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

Florida is a beautiful state, with sandy beaches, excellent fishing, fun people and a great enthusiasm for golf. When I dreamed up Trish, I knew she'd have an awesome family, but I never expected her parents to have a house on a golf course. Trish's grandma, Claire Stanley, is a legend in her own right. I've never met her, but I knew I loved her when Trish's dad first told me about her "layered shots". When I saw Claire's name listed several times on the walls of the The Country Club of Naples, a deep respect came over me. Claire picked out her house on the 17th hole (Trish's favorite number) of the Country Club in 1966, when the establishment was founded. My bus was born in 1966.

Today, Trish's parents have turned it into a golf and relaxation oasis, complete with beautiful orchid gardens, a sweet pool and Japanese decorations from the country where they first met.

As a golf enthusiast, I'm embarrassed that we've only visited her parents in Naples once before. We bought Abbie and Jack golf clubs last year for Jack's birthday, and they both like to play the game. To make up for our lack of visiting family in Florida, we took our kids on a golf vacation for this year's Spring Break.

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at vJUG

A couple months ago, I was invited to speak at Virtual JUG - an online-only Java User Group organized by the ZeroTurnaround folks. They chose my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation and we agreed I'd speak yesterday morning. They used a combination of Google Hangouts, live streaming on YouTube and IRC to facilitate the meeting. It all went pretty smoothly and produced a comfortable speaking environment. To practice for vJUG, I delivered the same talk on Tuesday night at the Denver Open Source Users Group.

The last time I delivered this talk was at Devoxx France in March 2013. I didn't change any of the format this time, keeping with referencing the Paradox of Choice and encouraging people to define constraints to help them make their decision. I did add a few new slides regarding RebelLabs' Curious Coder’s Java Web Frameworks Comparison: Spring MVC, Grails, Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, Play, Struts and JSF and The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks.

I also updated all the pretty graphs (which may or may not have any significance) with the latest stats from Dice.com, LinkedIn, StackOverflow and respective mailing lists. Significant changes I found compared to one year ago:

2013 - A Year in Review

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2014

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot

A typical Maven and Spring web application has a fair amount of XML and verbosity to it. Add in Jersey and Spring Security and you can have hundreds of lines of XML before you even start to write your Java code. As part of a recent project, I was tasked with upgrading a webapp like this to use Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I also figured I'd try to minimize the XML.

This is my story on how I upgraded to Spring 4, Jersey 2, Java 8 and Spring Boot 0.5.0 M6.

When I started, the app was using Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18. The pom.xml had four Jersey dependencies, three Spring dependencies and three Spring Security dependencies, along with a number of exclusions for "jersey-spring".

Upgrading to Spring 4
Upgrading to Spring 4 was easy, I changed the version property to 4.0.0.RC2 and added the new Spring bill of materials to my pom.xml. I also add the Spring milestone repo since Spring 4 won't be released to Maven central until tomorrow.

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.framework.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

The Modern Java Web Developer Bootcamp at Devoxx

At this year's Devoxx, I'll be delivering my first University session. University talks are in depth presentations of 3 hours (= 75m + 30m break + 75m). I'm calling it The Modern Java Web Developer Bootcamp and my goal is to teach people some new concepts and techniques that'll make them more valuable developers. My session's hashtag is #dv13-javaweb$ to exemplify the important takeaways: Java is back, web development is fun and you can make more money.

Three hours is quite a bit longer than I'm used to, but I'm confident I can fill the time with lots of knowledge. My plan is to enhance my presentation from JavaOne and add a few demos. Currently, I'm thinking of developing the following additional content:

• HTTP Overview (with SPDY)
• Polymer and Web Components
• Bootstrap 3 Overview
• HTML5 Storage
• API Framework Comparison (Play, Grails, Dropwizard)
• Load Testing
• Performance Monitoring (including RUM)
• Internal Cloud Options

For demos, I'd like to show a few that provide real value to attendees and teach them how to do something they haven't done before. The ones below are candidates I'm thinking of, and I'd like to pick three for the final presentation.

• Browser Tools Demo
• Developing with Bootstrap Demo
• AngularJS Demo
• Refactor an app from Spring to Java EE, no XML, all Java 8
• Page Speed Improvement Demo
• Security Demo (add LDAP to Angular app + OWASP ZAP)

If you could pick three real-time tutorials from the choices above, which ones would you choose?

I'm also thinking of adding some stories about impressive loads served with very little hardware and real-time dashboard development. If you have a story about either of these, please let me know. I'd be happy to credit you (or your company) and talk about any technical implementation details you're willing to provide.

JavaOne 2013: My Presentations

I flew into San Francisco this past Monday to speak at JavaOne 2013, and to meet with my new client. I made sure to wear a Broncos shirt since I was riding the train through Oakland and had some co-workers that were Raiders fans. My trip started off nicely as the Broncos dismantled the Raiders on Monday Night Football. My new team and I watched it during a team dinner at Havana in Walnut Creek. Historically, the Broncos and Raiders have had a heated rivalry historically, so the win was the perfect start to the week.

On Tuesday, I worked from my hotel in the morning, then met James Ward to do some last minute prep for our smackdown. The prior week, we both upgraded our respective apps to use the latest versions of Grails and Play Framework. I ran into a few issues when upgrading, while Play required some API changes.

We both added Memcachier to our apps (to share caching between dynos) and ran some Apache Bench tests. The results showed quite a bit of slowdown compared to last time, which we attributed to caching needing to make network hops. Other than that, we both had to make changes to our framework's buildpacks to get the latest versions running on Heroku, and when we headed for our talk, my instance of Grails wasn't running (60 second boot timeout on startup). The good news is it somehow solved its issues during our talk and was up and running when I checked it after, as it is now. Below is an embedded version of the presentation we delivered. You can also click here to see it in a new window, or view it on SlideShare.

On Wednesday morning, I tried to attend Venkat's Programming with Lambda Expressions in Java, but quickly discovered it was sold out. My talk on The Modern Java Web Developer started shortly after and I had a fantastic time talking to a packed room and preaching the virtues of learning and staying up-to-date with web technologies. I made sure to include a slide on Avatar, an Oracle-sponsored JavaScript-based framework that requires "very minor JavaScript knowledge". You can view my presentation below or on SlideShare.

According to @JavaOneConf, all JavaOne 2013 presentations will be published on Parleys.com.

After completing my talks, I journeyed to my client and practiced what I preached, successfully finishing a spike that reduced page load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds. That evening, I attended the Oracle Appreciation Event at Treasure Island, had some cold beer and listened to some loud music.

I had a great time speaking at JavaOne this year, and look forward to my next speaking engagement. In November, I'll be traveling to Devoxx where I'll be giving a 3-hour University session on The Modern Java Web Developer. Hope to see you there!

JavaOne 2013: My First Time Speaking

I've been to JavaOne many times in my life, starting in 2004 and continuing in 2005, 2006 and 2008. I have fond memories of the first couple years, meeting all the Java open source guys and having a lot of fun.

You might notice that the aforementioned blog posts no longer show pictures. That's because they were originally hosted on Apple's HomePage, which they shut down years ago. I haven't bothered to republish the photos and fix the links, but I do still have them. For those looking for a blast from the past, checkout Mike, Howard and James or Bruce and Marc. I also have a set of photos from our Geronimo Live party in 2006.

As many of you know, JavaOne used to be a huge conference, attracting 15,000 attendees back in the day. Numbers have dwindled a lot since Oracle bought Sun and I've heard recent years are more around 1500. Since I've spoken at a lot of conferences, but never JavaOne, I figured I'd try this year. The good news is I got accepted and I'll be there next week!

On Tuesday afternoon, I'll be presenting the Play Framework vs Grails Smackdown with James Ward. On Wednesday morning, I'll be talking about The Modern Java Web Developer. I also look forward to The Black Keys on Wednesday night.

I have a feeling it's gonna be a great week!

Happy Birthday Jack!

My son Jack, or "J Jackson" as he liked to be called, turns 9 years old today. In the last year, he's grown up quite a bit. He learned how to play basketball last fall, snowboard last winter and became a Webelos Scout in the spring. This summer, he learned how to ride a motorcycle and had a blast whitewater rafting with us. He did a fabulous job being my Best Son in our wedding.

This past weekend, we had a birthday party for Jack -- complete with a huge inflatable water slide. Trish and I flew in from our honeymoon 10 hours before the party started, but still managed to oversleep from jet lag. Nevertheless, we made it in time for some good fun and had a great time celebrating with the whole family and new friends from his new school. Below are a few choice pictures. The rest are on Flickr.

Jack's favorite thing to do is play Minecraft or watch YouTube videos about it. His sister still knows how to push his buttons, but he's learning to ignore her. This is a big year for Jack as he's starting a new school and making a bunch of new friends. I know he'll do great and I look forward to helping him adapt and enjoy it. Happy Birthday Jack!

Related: Jack's 8th, 5th, 4th, 3rd and 1st birthdays.