Give Your Developers IDE Choice
automated builds, software development
I shuddered reading this post:
After months of using Eclipse, of being forced to use Eclipse, I decided I just can’t continue down this path any longer. Like a burglar in the dead of night, or a drug smuggler on the border, I committed a most sinful and most treacherous act — I installed IntelliJ IDEA to continue with day to day Java development. In the context of the company I work for, this is tantamount to lying on your resume or sexual harassment. It’s big.
IDE choice shouldn’t be grounds for a disciplinary action. An IDE is just a tool, and for pretty much any java project you can use:
- Eclipse
- Netbeans
- IntelliJ IDEA
- JDeveloper
Forced standardization might make sense when you say make a decision to use Oracle over SQL Server for the database, but for an IDE you can use any of the above tools with no real additional costs. IntelliJ IDEA does have a nominal $250-$500 cost, but I find that not to be much of a barrier. Some developers including myself regularly switch between IDEs to take advantage of different features or plugins. I spend most of my time in IDEA, but occasionally I drop into IBM’s Eclipse based RAD. Other developers might jump from Eclipse to Netbeans to do some profiling.
One of the fatal issues that leads to things like forced IDE standardization is when you don’t have a fully automated build. If you can’t run ant, maven, or even rake from the command line, no IDE, you’re dead. This tends to lead to developers who can only build from within the IDE. Next comes ‘works on my machine’ problems. Then to further reinforce the bad decision to become completely reliant on an IDE you force all developers to use it all the time.
Automated builds avoid IDE lock-in.
Then there’s the shops that believe everything must be standardized. Avoid these standardization-happy shops.
Ed Gibbs @ June 23, 2007
Real programmers use vi
We use Eclipse uniformly in our organization. Folks have the choice, but everyone is happy with Eclipse. The upside is that the overall knowledge around Eclipse is quite high. The downside is that the maven/ant builds become 2nd class citizens when new dependencies are added, breaking the CI builds.
Interesting story: I once worked with a guy who refused to use any IDE, preferring notepad. Smart guy, but as I watched him struggle his way painfully and slowly through each edit/compile/debug cycle, I wondered how someone could possibly think that using an IDE (*any IDE!*) doesn’t help you be more productivity. He was an ex-IBMer, but I don’t think that was the root cause of the problem…
Yeah, I’ve met the Notepad only people, but strangely never hired one. Almost any IDE for Java/C# should be a significant productivity boost. I’m OK with the emacs people, because I figure at least it’s a high end text editor that can be practically infinitely customized. Notepad is acceptable only for quicky “Hello World” examples.
i once got told off for switching my PDF reader.
A PDF Reader, I assume because it wasn’t on the list of approved software.
Hey Ed…can I work for you?
But seriously, I think your analysis is correct. I’ve been hearing good things about Netbeans, particularly with their UI related stuff and I can see myself firing that up if I had to do some UI related work…and then I’d switch back to Intellij for most stuff. I might even use them both at the same time. But I’d like to have that flexibility to choose what to use and when I need to use it. I currently don’t have that flexibility.
While I’m here, since you’re using WordPress, might I suggest a plugin that I think you would would find really handy: it’s the Subscribe to Comments. It can be downloaded at: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
That will give you a checkbox that allows people to subscribe to posts. They’ll be notified by email of activity on comments on a post. This is great when you want to keep track of discussions you entered into on other people’s sites but can’t remember where or remember to go back and check. Note: it might appear to be broken when all you see is an empty checkbox on plugin activation — just remember to configure it with the text you want to display next to the checkbox.
Cheers mate.
Thanks for the wordpress comment plugin idea, I’m checking it out right now.