NeoOffice 2.1

I just installed the new Early Access Release of NeoOffice 2.1, the “Aquafied” version of OpenOffice.org. The new version supports OpenXML documents and VBA Macros.

It available only for subscribers now, but will be released to everyone later.

I haven’t really tested it but I think I notice a (very welcome) speedup. The UI improvements are also nice.

If you’re a Mac user, consider joining the Early Access Program (just $25) to support further development.

Please, add source jars to the Maven repositories

A nice thing with Maven is the source bundles that some projects add to the repositories, next to the jars. It really helps when debugging to be able to step into code from dependencies. Right now, I’m debugging a class loading problem and need to step into cglib.

Too many times I’ve been browsing project websites for source code for the precise version of the jar I use. Then download a tar.gz file and find the source folder, jar it and add it to Eclipse. It takes time if you have a lot of dependencies.

With all the source code downloaded you might check it in to your SCM, forcing all developers to always check it out, even if they wont need it 90% of the time.

With Maven it’s only a setting or a command line switch to have the source available. No need to have source for dependecies in SCM (and no binary jars either for that matter).

But, only IF the project (or the Maven package maintainer) has uploaded the source code to the Maven repository.

The majority do not. Please, fix that.

Temporary in Netbeans land

I’m building a desktop client based on Netbeans Platform and therefore I have left Eclipse for a while. Now after three weeks with daily interaction with Netbeans IDE, I want to summarize my impressions.

Pros:

Matisse. Wonderful. Nuff’ said.

It’s nice to use Swing. It feels really snappy on my Mac. The look and feel is good. For me, SWT’s only advantage is Eclipse. I would not build a RCP on Eclipse/SWT.

Cons:

CVS integration. I miss the sync view in Eclipse every day. I constantly miss some file so that the build fails on my other machine, or my co-workers. We have also checked in binary files in ascii mode a few times. *.png was not recognized automatically as binary.

Error reporting. It always take a while to notice coding errors. I sometimes stop in the middle of typing, waiting for the errors to show and the small light bulb to appear. Eclipse is much better in that respect. Also the quick fixes in Netbeans are not as good as in Eclipse.

I’m mostly doing plugin projects and they behave different from Java projects. I can’t find a way to add more source directories. I can’t seem to run my unit tests in the plugin projects either.

Manage the classpath and source code attachments is also harder in Netbeans. This is especially true for plugin projects with the Library Wrapper concept. I know it’s there to help me to isolate my modules and their dependencies, but it’s not straight forward. My co-worker discovered that you could add more than one jar file to a library wrapper module, but that was not obvious.

After three weeks I would love to go back and continue working in Eclipse. I guess I could do that and use the Netbeans generated Ant script to build the project, but it would be a lot of work setting everything up in Eclipse, I think. I depend a lot on the Netbeans APIs.

Anyone out there who uses Eclipse to build apps on Netbeans Platform?

London instead of SF?

I’ve been working at companies that wanted me to grow and keep up with new stuff. So they’ve sent me to JavaOne four times. Now I just started my own company with four other guys, and we are on a tight budget right now. So there will probably not be any Javaone for me this year. Then I saw this. Great set of topics and speakers. London is not that far away, definetly cheaper flights. Still a lot of money though.