waaaahhh - way too busy at work to find time to write entries and still off line at home. Can’t believe in this day and age there are civilised places without broadband.
Its been a ridiculous two or three weeks trying to get two letters from Amerada to say that the accounts we had for the last house are closed. How hard could that be? well two weeks and numerous phone calls later – I have just got one letter and along the way managed to get another spurious one saying that I was going to be paying them £77 a month (which is even by their admission a total lie). Sadly the call centre means that customer care is done by people who don’t care at all. If there isn’t a button for it in front of them there is nothing that can be done. Having seen it all from the other side as well (as in building the IT systems) it makes life easier for the companies if their interaction with the customer fits into neat organized boxes that they can plan around. Customers that don’t fit in those boxes are TROUBLE and can be safely ignored. A big rich company can afford to piss off a percentage of its customer base with little or no consequence. I guess its just a sign of the times but it doesn’t help much when you are trying to get things done.
A week or so ago a previously small issue suddenly became a big one for me. Working in a team of predominately younger developers I was increasingly finding that my working methods (code style etc.) where at odds with the prevailing trends. Now – there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that trends come and go and its best to do what’s good for the way I work. In addition I feel that the current “standards” are overly formal and weighted heavily to making sure that the inexperienced programmer (which the majority of Java devolopers working in the world are) doesn’t make mistakes rather than the experienced programmer working quickly and efficiently. On the other hand I work in a team that uses these standards and I also work in an industry where those standards are the norm. In the end I decided to give in and work in a way that suits everyone rather than just myself.
The standard way of doing things needs a fair amount of maintenance (I won’t go into the details here) and is a total pain when you do it by hand so it seemed to be time to start using an IDE. I have tried a number of Java IDE’s over the years but they seemed to be geared towards interface development rather than the more server oriented that I do. Enter Eclipse. Eclipse is the right tool. Its for working on code – its tools are geared to the sort of things you actually want to do. I am so impressed with it I am still using it even though it slows my machine to a crawl. If you write any Java you should be using this tool.
Posted by Mark at May 13, 2003 12:46 PMI've had a love-hate relationship with Eclipse. Its still has that weird VisualAge for Java feel about it. You know the one: oh damn, I'm lost in some meaningless screen, how did I get here, what does it mean, how do I get out of it ? Fast....! That's the other thing, it makes JBuilder look nimble.
Still, eventually we too will succomb to the glutony of Eclipse, specifically we'll make use of the OLE COM+ integration.
Happy hacking,
Ij.
Posted by: Ijonas Kisselbach at May 13, 2003 06:25 PM