Since a lot of time has passed since the last blog entry I’ll try to summarize the most recent news in one large incoherent entry - bear with me…
JADE… no new updates. The past couple of weeks and months have been filled with day to day work, partially in an attempt to finish an important piece of software for our new partner BALVI, partially for my Ph.D. thesis. I have been working on and off on some minor aspects of JADE but sadly right now the whole item code is in a state where it’s very hard to progress quickly. Every step brings a combination of new wonders and work which is partly exhilarating, partly exhausting. Today I have been toying around with some new ideas centering around so called composite oriented programming (particularly as done by the Qi4j framework, see http://www.qi4j.org and more about that in a forthcoming blog entry). But probably for the better or worse of JADE it’s now to late to introduce Qi4j. More on that later…
I’m right now switching back from IntelliJ to Eclipse although I believe that IntelliJ is the much better IDE and Eclipse is getting worse and worse with each new version. The simple reason for that is that I’m using Eclipse during day to day work for a variety of reasons (not the least being that the majority of our customers is using Eclipse) and I’m unable to wrap my brain around two completely different sets of key commands. Additionally I once more would have to pay for IntelliJ 8 and I’m just not willing to shell out bucks regularly for a hobby when some other tool also works… well… well enough. Additionally Eclipse has better support for writing Javadoc (shame on you, IntelliJ).
Then there will be three big announcements (according to the current plan) for 2009, only the first of which will happen here and now: My mentor asked me to defend my Ph.D. thesis in July 2009, so now there is really the time to finish writing on the thesis (which has suffered even more than JADE in recent months). On the other hand the whole thing now has a definite goal and I’m looking forward to finishing it since this will leave with me with my one remaining computer related hobby, namely JADE. More announcements to follow for August and the end of the year… probably.
Ok, more later. See ya!
8 responses so far ↓
1 Mandor // Dec 8, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Thanks for the update. It’s obvious that life comes first. Be seeing you!
2 sykstyrius // Dec 8, 2008 at 8:48 pm
STOP complaining about Eclipse.
START filling bugs! (http://bugs.eclipse.org)
3 admin // Dec 8, 2008 at 9:55 pm
No need to shout, it’s a free world. That’s the great thing about free software. I can use it, I can love it, I can hate it and I can complain about it.
In case of Eclipse I just lack the time to enter the multitude of ideas I have and the bugs I encounter, especially since I probably would need o research if a similar bug exists.
Thus I’ll just suffer it’s interface (spellchecking for XML files… cool idea… a working IDE would be even cooler… like without non-working Tomcat deployments that require a complete cleanup… or slow reaction times during strange project rebuilds… or abort actions that take as long as completing the action… or…. ah, forget about it). Before I spend the time to research and report the annoying things I probably will pay once more for the next version of IntelliJ because it would be a more efficient way to spend my limited resources.
Your mileage may vary.
4 sykstyrius // Dec 9, 2008 at 8:11 am
It was not shouting
just an emphasizing 
I am just irritated
My adventure with Eclipse started from your recommendation a long time ago, and I am really deep in it right now.
I bet you would complain about IntelliJ if it had serious bugs - you paid for it so it has bigger value for you.
But Eclipse cannot be and will never be great without user feedback…
5 bigsva // Dec 9, 2008 at 10:19 am
Please don’t forget to take care of your health, too =) Life’s short and I still hope to see Jade! Most prefferably before my retirement =) So good luck and thanks for keeping us informed =)
6 admin // Dec 9, 2008 at 11:06 am
Just to end the Eclipse argument from my point of view: Eclipse is not inherently bad (well, not that bad ;-). Especially for JADE it probably will be perfectly serviceable. Only during my daytime work I curse every hour at least once because Eclipse crashes or misbehaves when trying to do serious JEE development… but even with these high crash numbers it’s still much better than e.g. the WebSphere products from IBM as far as I am personally concerned. Just to name an exampe.
And the sad truth is that I (as well as my colleagues - who are string open source supportes) do not have the time to research some weird bug every hour.
Which doesn’t lessen my respect for the work of the Eclipse team. Personally I simply think that the “IDE to end all IDEs” is simply overdesigned and IntelliJ e.g. has an easier life being better because they don’t try to be the best for everything, just for manual coding Java (and more scripting in more recent versions).
And yes, IntelliJ also has problems. I’m very annoyed by the lack of Javadoc writing support, the rather uncomfortable auto-completion (compared to Eclipse, even if it knows to do a lot more it’s just to tedious to activate the correct auto-completion mode for me).
So, that’s it as far as I am concerned
7 DarrenGrey // Dec 11, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Good to hear an update on progress. Obviously your PhD should be receiving priority right now though.
However, if you get a mo, any chance you could sort out the problem with the forums being down? Ye olde “database error” has reared its ugly head again…
8 vogonpoet // Dec 12, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Rather than shouting, maybe we could say you were trying to improve your Intimidation skill modifier perhaps?
Initimidation skill. I wants some.
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