Artemis Software Blog Summary

JavaRebel speeds Confluence plugin development

Imagine for a moment that you're developing a Confluence plugin. Usually each change to your code requires at a minimum that you:

• uninstall the plugin
• run a maven build (which also reinstalls the plugin)
• if you're using a debugger probably struggle a bit to keep the instruction pointer on track

This is already an extremely efficient process for server development by any measure, but still takes a few manual steps and likely at least 20 to 30 seconds. That's not long, but after a few iterations is just enough time to where you might decide to glance at Digg, the BBC or see if the Chevy Volt is still on schedule and get distracted.

Now imagine there is virtually nothing to do and no delay for your Java changes to be picked up - approximately 1 second.

This is JavaRebel.

There is thorough information on the JavaRebel site in terms of the advantages and benefits it affords so I'll just briefly mention my personal experience.

The one thing I've always liked least about server side development are the delays to compile, redeploy and sometimes even minutes to restart a server. What JavaRebel has accomplished is really a Holy Grail of sorts in my mind.

I tried using JavaRebel for plugin devel upon its release in 2007. However at the time I could not get it to work with Confluence's plugin class loader. Last week I decided to give it another go and with help from their very responsive support and leveraging a new 'JavaRebel plugin framework' we now have it working with the Confluence plugin devel cycle.

Here is a demo video I made showing it used with a Confluence plugin
Here are the JavaRebel installation instructions specific to Confluence.

There are more polished videos of JavaRebel in use here.

One last question might be, "Is it worth the price?" (currently $49 or $149 or ....) I believe JavaRebel easily pays for itself in a couple hours of active coding in increased productivity not to mention a sense of empowerment and accomplishment when you start to fly through tasks in minutes that used to take hours. Personally I think Java development just got a lot more fun.

One last thing. I've not yet tried it with JIRA plugin development but the benefits will be even much more vast as JIRA does not as of yet support dynamic loading for plugins. Actually because of JavaRebel I plan to become much more active in JIRA development.

see ya Verizon - on track for the iPhone 3G

I got out of my Verizon account without paying the ~$175 early termination fee.

this was the link that helped me

It's pretty funny convincing someone that $0.15/month is a 'materially adverse affect', but one man's $0.15 cents is another man's treasure.

The Verizon supervisor said "we'll credit you the $0.15 cents that we raised the administrative fee."
I said, "thanks but no thanks, I'm going to go ahead and take advantage of Verizon's offer in the agreement."
"but it's only $0.15 cents"
I said, "Hey man it may only be $0.15 cents to you, but it's materially adverse to me. That's great if you're rolling in cash but I've gotta fill up my mini-van and if you haven't noticed gas prices aren't going down."

I might feel a tinge of guilt if their service in my area weren't so bad and drops calls all the time in Los Angeles no less.

At last no longer an iPhone 'have not' and the 3G in three weeks no less.

Groovy greatness - scripting, Java, debugging and update it all on the fly!

Groovy!

The dynamic scripting language for Java I've been meaning to learn and start using. I'm a bit embarrassed its taken me this long, but now that I have I'm a bit floored at how productive it is starting to make me.

One thing essential for me personally to use any programming construct with confidence is to be able to hook it into a debugger. I know of people who love their println statements, but having to sprinkle those into an app to understand what's happening is seems silly at best....incredibly inefficient, time consuming, mind numbing at worst.

Here are a couple quick videos of what I discovered. While experimenting with mixing in some Groovy to an existing Java application, debugging it, and then changing things around it all just worked. Without needing to stop the JVM or recompile-hotswap the debugger still picked up everything. The JVM and debugger even picked up signature changes like new methods and method params. Such somersaults usually makes the JVM hotswap laugh at you like you're a penguin trying to fly.

here are two quick amateur videos showing this:

• Mixing Groovy into a java app, debugging and changing on the fly
• Groovy, the JVM and deugger picking up signature changes on the fly

my all time best purchase

the winner is my MacBook Pro!

It wasn't cheap but the MacBook Pro is a bargain at 10x the price.

This computer + OS X Tiger is just so good I'm constantly in awe of it even after having it for six months. The thought of ever having to go back to a Windows environment for anything more than a couple of apps (like Quicken/Quickbooks) or 2 via VMWare Fusion makes me break out in a cold sweat. I'd sooner be lashed (lightly).

Everyone I know who already used a Mac has said, "You have a keen grasp of the obvious."

I finally made the leap because of Apple's switch to the Intel chip and the availability of solid virtualization software like VMWare's Fusion. The few apps I do have to run in a Windows environment work like a dream. I guess they tried all this in the mid-90s (running Windows on a mac), but finally everything has come together for real.

Here is a short list of my can't live without OS X apps in no particular order:
Skitch
PathFinder - Finder got a lot better with Leopard but PathFinder is much more powerful.
QuickSilver
VMWare Fusion
Freemind
Cyberduck
Adium
IntelliJ IDEA
ITerm
Thunderbird
Firefox

possibly ScreenFlow or Jing (if you could save useful files).

I could go on, but my procrastination break time is over.

Jing is good, with one more feature it could be great

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Finally TechSmith is developing for the Mac. Their main product Camtasia is the best screencast software / editing package IMO in the range of a couple of hundred dollars. But of course it's only on Windows at the moment.

Their new Jing Project is very exciting and quite good, but not great. The one place it falls short is that it only saves files in SWF (Flash) format. That's fine for playing, but you can't do anything else with them. For instance if you want to edit a recording as in snip a few seconds here and voice over a few seconds there you're completely up the creek.

SnapZ Pro would be OK if it would just let you pause a recording. Short of that I find it generally not very useful verging on useless.

The best hope for screencasting on the Mac for which there are currently no good options South of Final Cut Pro ($$$$) is still when Camtasia is release on the Mac.