Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

Thanks for the kudos from the IntelliJ IDEA Blog! I enjoy pointing out the little known, but very useful, features that makes IntelliJ IDEA so pleasurable to use (and makes me so much more productive). It’s certainly nice to know that someone besides my dog is reading this blog (no, not even my wife reads this blog). I’m prepping another tip for tomorrow, but if anyone has any plug-ins that they like (especially if you wrote it!), let me know in the comments.

All is well, at least on my machine, for build 7744. When I get time, I’m going to take a look at the Flex support, but that probably won’t happen for a few weeks.

Another 7.0.3 release candidate (#2) is now available:

Selena, build 7744 (IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.3 Release Candidate 2) is available
at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/Selena+EAP

Detailed release notes: http://jetbrains.net/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?version=11550&styleName=Html&projectId=10132&Create=Create

Looks like mostly new features and fixes for Adobe Flex development, with some other miscellaneous but not earth-shattering fixes. As usual, I’ll download, install and start using it. I enjoy the bleeding edge.

Looks like the Structure101 plugin is now an official IntelliJ IDEA “companion”. At first I thought it was just a superset of IDEA’s DSM (dependency structure matrix), but it appears to have many more features than that, including ways to have your continuous build warn you of architectural violations in a way similar to PMD or Checkstyle, but obviously at a much higher level or different point of view. See the Structure101 features page on JetBrains’ site for more info.

I’ll be taking a look at the plugin soon (there’s a free trial), but I mention it because it’s not been unheard of for IntelliJ IDEA Companion products to be incorporated into IDEA itself. Based on the price of Structure101, I’m not sure that this would happen since it’s normally US$599. For now, there’s a US$100 discount through March 31, 2008 using the coupon LDJNZ-BYG0P-E1I27-OLMI9-L8KY5 at http://companions.jetbrains.com/structure101/license.html.

I was just reading Per Olesen’s blog entry about Adobe Flex and the fact that it’s closed source and proprietary, and it hit me that the reason I haven’t tried Flex is because the source isn’t available. I remember years ago at eBay when we were using C#/ASP.NET 1.1 for internal web app development and it was so frustrating because when an exception was thrown inside the framework, you’d hit the “no source wall”: the place where the stack trace leads you to code that you can’t look at. At least in the Java framework I can trace through the code and even set breakpoints in framework code so I could figure out if it was my code’s fault or a bug in the framework. Usually it was my code, but whereas in Java I could figure out what I was doing wrong by looking at the Java framework code, in ASP.NET I often just gave up and tried a completely different way of solving the problem (usually by tossing out the use of ADO.NET). Sometimes I even went to the Mono source to see what they’re doing and it did help when I was creating ASP widgets, but it’s not the same thing as having all of the source available with the ability to step into it in a debugger.

I haven’t followed .NET development much since I left eBay, but I’ve noticed that Microsoft has opened up some of the .NET framework source, which is definitely a move in the right direction.

So, I guess subconsciously I’ve been staying away from otherwise appealing frameworks if I can’t access the source code. And it doesn’t have to be “open source”, as in GPL, LGPL, etc., but I at least want the option of seeing it if I need to. I don’t mind proprietary, but without the source, I’m going to choose another framework, my time is too valuable to hit my head against the wall otherwise.