There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them. Just like there are ways of writing fairly concise, readable Java, but most of the code written day-to-day is garbage.
> There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them.
Pointers would be very much appreciated.
I've inherited 50K lines of java of the 'cut-and-paste' variety after one of those 'rockstar ninja' types quit just before product launch and I'm busy refactoring and commenting everything. Currently the ect cycle is on the order of a couple of minutes and I'd really like to get that down to something more manageable.
When I was doing JSF development, I found the real problem was that libraries were often developed without an awareness of how to make it reload-safe. So yeah, it's theoretically possible to hit Save and Refresh and have Tomcat automatically pick up your changes, but in practice I found that all sorts of strange things happened in the 3rd party libraries that made up the middle of our technology stack.
I think one of the main strengths of the Python/Ruby communities is that it's expected that you'll be able to edit a file and immediately have the changes reflected. If this doesn't happen, people complain! While in the Java world, a lot of people (including myself, eventually) just accept it as business as usual, because so many libraries and apps don't work like that.
Comments
There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them. Just like there are ways of writing fairly concise, readable Java, but most of the code written day-to-day is garbage.
> There are ways of avoiding the long compile/deploy cycle in Java development, but most people don't take the time to learn them.
Pointers would be very much appreciated.
I've inherited 50K lines of java of the 'cut-and-paste' variety after one of those 'rockstar ninja' types quit just before product launch and I'm busy refactoring and commenting everything. Currently the ect cycle is on the order of a couple of minutes and I'd really like to get that down to something more manageable.
When I was doing JSF development, I found the real problem was that libraries were often developed without an awareness of how to make it reload-safe. So yeah, it's theoretically possible to hit Save and Refresh and have Tomcat automatically pick up your changes, but in practice I found that all sorts of strange things happened in the 3rd party libraries that made up the middle of our technology stack.
I think one of the main strengths of the Python/Ruby communities is that it's expected that you'll be able to edit a file and immediately have the changes reflected. If this doesn't happen, people complain! While in the Java world, a lot of people (including myself, eventually) just accept it as business as usual, because so many libraries and apps don't work like that.