NetBeans 4. Free vs. commercial development tools.

I spent some time 'kicking the tires'. Version 4 looks to be a major improvement both in edit/build/test mode and in web app development functionality. It is great that a good IDE like NetBeans is available for free. However, since I earn most of my living designing and writing Java code, I feel that it is worth while buying a 'best of breed' commercial product (which, in my opinion, is IntelliJ).

Same thing with Common Lisp: there are awesomely good free Common Lisp compilers available (e.g., OpenMCL, CLisp, SBCL, CMU). Still, the free tools are just not at the same level as the Xanalys LispWorks and the Franz's Allegro CL. The commercial products provide a richer development environment and library support. Allegro CL is out of my budget price range, so I happily use LispWorks.

Python is the other programming language that I use a lot. I am still trying to find a 'best of breed' Python IDE. I mostly develop on Mac OS X so the ActiveState IDE is not a possibility. I have tried a trial version of the WingSoft IDE (runs under X11 on Mac OS X) and it is good but just not at the same level as IntelliJ or LispWorks. So, I just use Emacs (for about 15 years, I did all of my coding in Emacs, but productivity-wise, Emacs is simply not competitive with commercial IDEs like IntelliJ).

Anyway: great work on the new NetBeans release!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more