A First Look At Red Hat Developer Studio

juanignaciosl writes "The first beta of Red Hat Developer Studio was published yesterday. RHDS seems promising. This IDE is a bunch of Eclipse plugins that comes from the fusion of JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio. The main advantages it offers are: JSF development improved, in particular integrating RichFaces and Ajax4JSF libraries; Seam (next J2EE middleware standard?) integration; and plugins for JBoss, Hibernate... Here are my first impressions."

Comments

HuH?

[russ1337]

"This IDE is a bunch of Eclipse plugins that comes from the fusion of JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio. The main advantages it offers are: JSF development improved, in particular integrating RichFaces and Ajax4JSF libraries; Seam (next J2EE middleware standard?) integration; and plugins for JBoss, Hibernate.."

Now I know that is in English, but I have no idea what half of those words mean.

Re:HuH?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You think he knows more about the words than you do? Those who know, do. Those who don't talk.

Re:HuH?

[Frymaster]

You think he knows more about the words than you do? Those who know, do. Those who don't talk.

those who don't and think they do, post on slashdot.

Re:HuH?

[Bluesman]

That's not the submitter's problem. You need to bone up on some acronyms, or you'll never make a goodJavaProgrammer. Here's a quick lesson in what you should do:

Write a thousand different programs using acronyms that start with J that do nothing except fuck up the data as it's being transmitted between the database and your application. Then, you have to write automated tools that also are acronyms that start with J and contain the word "Bean" in there somewhere, and those exist to generate parts of those previously mentioned thousand programs.

Then, write some Swing components that have nothing to do with all of this, and call those by almost exactly the same names, so that people get confused and can't do a proper Google search for documentation. Name an IDE after the Swing components, too.

Finally, call it all "middleware," give it yet ANOTHER name and bundle it all together, making sure that everything breaks if you don't include fifty different XML configuration files in the proper directory hierarchy that changes with each version.

Then when all of this doesn't work for more than one project because it's hopelessly complex, do it all over again and call it the next greatest revolution in Java middleware.

Re:HuH?

[Eddi3]

If you don't know what was said there, you probably don't need to know.

Re:HuH?

[Bluesman]

Actually, I was being a bit facetious.

People actually DO get J2EE apps to work. Here is a very informative instructional video by some Japanese researchers who show how it's done:

J2EE Example

Re:HuH?

[Bluesman]

Me too. I think that's what happens when you try to make a all-in-one solution without realizing there's a tradeoff between power and flexibility. You either make something that's too specific to be useful so that users have to constantly fight against design decisions you made, or something that requires almost as much work to make it do what you want than writing it from scratch would.

The ridiculously complex configuration files are a symptom of moving as many design decisions as possible out to the last possible moment. Complexity isn't reduced, it's just in a different place.

Which, ironically, makes the whole thing that much more complex, since now you have multiple places things can go wrong.

I tried using this stuff years ago, and found it wasn't close to worth the hassle, especially for a single developer. I just did a search for "J2EE success story," and the vast majority of hits were about a small team of Python programmers replacing large J2EE teams that failed to produce a working product.

But maybe I'm wrong, and the people who know much more than I do about this can list a hundred different projects where J2EE saved the company. It just seems like it's overhyped and people are really much more concerned about the scaffolding they're using than the work that they're supposed to be doing with it.

Re:HuH?

[computational super]

I just did a search for "J2EE success story," and the vast majority of hits were about a small team of Python programmers replacing large J2EE teams that failed to produce a working product.

I'm not convinced that this is entirely Java/J2EE's fault as much as it is that big corporations love Java and hate Python (and Perl) and have "big-corporatized" Java. Java was actually pretty cool when it first came out... if big industry embraced Python today, by tomorrow you'd see an explosion of PBPEL, P2EE, PDBC, PFaces, PSF and PMS applications and by the next day you'd be assigned to a committee to evaluate the product vendors to find the scalable enterprise solution that was the best fit for your business integration challenges. After a month of vendor selections, you'd narrow the candidates down to the top two contenders, and they'd pitch their expertise in the field, and then your company would sign a multi-million dollar contract with one of them. Then you'd start the process of trying to figure out how to get around the inherent limitations of the "solution" and do plain-old Python programming inside the "container" without it being too obvious to the higher-ups that that's what you're doing...

Re:HuH?

[iwan-nl]

PMS applications? *shudders*

Re:You mean...

[LinuxGeek]

Yup, they are still around despite the best efforts of SCO. And RH is making useful and relevant (cross-distro too) tools unlike the Me crap from SCO. I am running this on ubuntu and can even deploy on different platforms! Sounds like RedHat is confident in the quality of their products, unlike that sue-happy company.

Re:You mean...

[jellomizer]

Your confusing Red Hat with SCO.

Sounds promising..

[jshriverWVU]

for Java developers. What I'd really like to see is something like Project Builder/Xcode or Visual Studio for Linux. (Not that I like Visual Studio) but if you need to pound out a GUI it's pretty easy. There's a relatively large learning curve for developers wanting to do work for X. There is a myriad of libraries with their own widgets to choose from, languages, IDE's. It get's a bit confusing when you just want to sit down and code something, or add a GUI to an existing cli app.

Trolltech's suite so far has been the best one I've seen yet but has licensing issues. I've tried KDevelop and it's not that bad, but still not great. The ones I've seen for gnome have been even harder.

A good IDE for developing GUI applications, should help the developer a bit more with the GUI stuff and not make it mandatory that you know every call to every function of every widget for whatever library that package supports. If you knew that, might as well stick with Emacs/vi/nano and code it. Which it seems is how most development is done. (which isn't bad) but makes it harder for someone else starting out and wanting to give it a try.

Re:Sounds promising..

[ianare]

There are several IDEs for linux, my favorites: boa-constructor, glade.

Re:Sounds promising..

[Anonymous Coward]

try netbeans (www.netbeans.org). it's fairly straight forward, and has a nice gui builder for swing called matisse. it's drag and drop from a palette.

personally, I use eclipse with swtbuilder and other stuff, but netbeans out-of-the-box experience is much better.

Re:Sounds promising..

[TheAwfulTruth]

GUI builders are not IDEs they are one of MANY components to a real IDE.

An actual IDE takes care of GUI design, code editing, debugging, project management, documentation, source control and on and on. And they are scripted environments with plug-in interfaces, compilers and debuggers source control front entds etc. so that you can choose what programs you want to use for what tasks.

That is an Integrated Devlopment Environment. Admitedly IDEs are not for everyone but as this is the subject...

Visual Studio is hardly "perfect" but it is BY FAR in advace of /anything/ I've used on Linux that calls itself an "IDE".

Re:Sounds promising..

[thelima]

De gustibus not dispu^H^H^H^Hblah, blah, blah. But You know - I could hardly consider development environment something without support of unit-testing built-in (don't tell me about VSTS). I could sacrifice all graphical wizards for single one feature of Eclipse IDE which is not available in VS.NET (without third party plugins) - live compilation together with quick fixes. To give You feeling, when I have a bug it is immediately highlighted (no save no magic keystrokes). Not only this but also I can see *ALL* dependent resources as "invalid". I sut, the, simply press CTRL+1 I usually get useful quick fixes offered by IDE. Such as: surround with try catch, initialize plus dozen other. See Quick Fixes in Eclipse. Of course there is much more juicy details unavailable in VS. Light years ahead refactorisation, far, far better auto-complete (in VS.NET is just a toy, nothing comparable to eclipse), excellent support for team-programming - just two words - Mylar and Team support - show me something comparable to structural diffs in VS.NET. Should I write more? VS.NET is just below average IDE, with lot's of useless Wizards You will never use in real life, but lacking some *crucial* thing others have for Years. I could bet, I can write comparable java webapp without fancy wizards faster than You wit those wizards...

Re:But does it support JCV

[WED Fan]

Whole new bunch of acronyms are coming down the pipe. I don't think all are web, and may not be associated with a particular OS or file format. Microsoft just trade marked, patented and are looking for fast track ISO approval of the following:

• SUP
• ERCA
• LIFR
• AGILIST
• ICEX
• PIA
• LIDOC
• IOUS

This according to an attorney in their IP department, M. Poppins.

The sound of it is quite atrocious.

Does anyone have insight on these?

Re:But does it support JCV

[Anonymous Coward]

> Seriously, do these flavor of the month java libraries mean anything to anyone?

Yes, they make them specifically for no-talent hacks on slashdot can sneer at them and say how they could write a distributed transaction backend with reliable multicast messaging using PHP and MySQL in a week.

TextMate

[Paulrothrock]

I have yet to see an IDE that has a text editor that compares to TextMate. The fonts are ugly, color/theme management is poor, integration with the PC is poor or non-existent, and macros and custom code are much more difficult than TextMate.

These may be good when you need to manage massive projects, but I can't stand to use them for actually writing code. If there was only some way to replace the text editor in these IDEs with TextMate but keep all the trappings that make compiling and deploying these apps easy.

Some info about our project

[_marshall]

Hey everyone.. I work on the JBossTools and RHDS Team and just wanted to give some community-level info about our project.

Red Hat Developer Studio is our commercial offering of the JBossTools open source project (formerly known as JBossIDE), which has a vibrant community of users and contributors. You can check out our project(s) at the following URLs:

JBossTools main page: http://jboss.org/tools
JBossTools blog: http://jbosstools.blogspot.com/
JBossTools 2.0.0.beta3: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=22866&package_id=242269&release_id=531957
RHDS 1.0.0.beta1 (based on JBossTools 2.0.0.beta3): http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html

Feel free to drop by #jbosstools on freenode, we'd love to hear from you!

Jesus Christ, will someone please rip off ASP.NET?

[melted]

Jesus Christ, will someone please rip off ASP.NET? I've looked at all the crazy proliferation of Java web frameworks and they all pretty much suck. You have to maintain a bunch of XML files for things that ASP.NET just figures out on its own, docs suck, architecture is bizarre. It's all just a giant, productivity draining mess. Why can't I just have transparent interaction between the page and code? Why do I have to "register" crap (through XML file) that should just be available transparently from page code? Why do I have to create "navigation rules"? Why do I have to "declare beans"?

No wonder turds like Ruby on Rails are so popular. I'd rather shoot myself than use Java for web development.

Re:Jesus Christ, will someone please rip off ASP.N

[wzzzzrd]

try wicket. no xml, no navigation rules, not a single piece of code in your markup files (it's simply not possible), ALL logic is in the java files. no stupid bean mapping to forms, a component concept (oh, there i can download a tabbed panel component, let's do this) that actually works. it really is what i think MVC should be like.

and a very good api design, KISS, no overhead and all that core servlet stuff is hidden from you.

Re:But does it support JCV

[FatherOfONe]

Well put.

I have to say that the place I use to work standardized in Java and Linux on the servers and everything worked well. Then I left and they hired a new kid out of college that couldn't believe how "long" it took to code stuff using JSF/Java. He pushed and pushed to do a project in PHP. He quoted around one fifth the time to do a project that another developer had quoted to do in Java, saying that the time using PHP would more than make up the difference. In short, the project took around 2X as long as the original Java quote (~10X as long as he had quoted) and thus they are back to working with Java again. I am not about to say that any language is bad, but when you focus 70+% of your effort on business logic, (most of our work), then it is a little hard to believe someone when they say that language X is 5X faster than language Y.

My question about this new IDE from RedHat is this:
Can I do visual JSF development in a true WYSIWYG environment like Netbeans?

Can I do Swing development in a WYSIWYG environemnt like Netbeans?

Can I easily choose not to use the custom components that you include? I would assume so, but my fear is that RedHat focused on this product working with JBOSS and getting it to work with other application servers may be a pain.

I like Eclipse, but I have found Netbeans 5.5 to be better for what I do so migrating back to Eclipse would take some great features, and would be interested to see how far this has come. Oh yeah, and one last, but very important thing. You still don't hack Eclipse on Linux to run under the GCJ crap do you? If you did that then I can only imagine all the problems I had using your product before would be back again. I hope now that Java is under the GPL that you don't mess with that abomination (GCJ) and have included the real JVM with your Linux and more specifically don't have any of your tools reliant on the GCJ.

Re:13 years of hype

[porkThreeWays]

It's disappointing that I got modded troll because it's acknowledged by most in the Java community that there were many big design mistakes in the first few versions of Java. Java 5 (aka 1.5) really was the first great version of Java.

The original GUI toolkit was admittedly thrown together for the sake of having a GUI toolkit. Swing is leaps and bounds better, but it's very confusing to beginners learning two GUI toolkits at the same time. If you didn't know the history of why there are two it's very confusing.

The original garbage collector sucked hardcore and was slow. The current garbage collector is actually pretty good, but for many they equate Java with being slow because of old versions.

Containers are leaps and bounds better and much more type-safe, but again it's confusing to beginners why there are so many redundant ways to use containers. There are numerous optimizations at the compiler level. The biggest being the ability compile code adaptively instead of the whole program on startup. I/O is confusing to learn and imo overly complex. Again, this is because of Java's subpar original I/O subsystem.

Java has really grown up and gotten leaps and bounds better over the years. Java today is what it should have been in the first place and what was originally advertised. That's where the marketing came in. Java honestly wasn't very impressive to me when it first gained attention. Today I'm very impressed by it. But most people don't understand how much Java has grown up and in their minds they have Java of 1999 stuck in their heads.

Simplifying the Process (was Re:HuH?)

[jklappenbach]

While I agree that complex configuration files are a bane to development, I disagree with the assertion that J2EE requires them. ORM technologies like JPA are utilizing Java 5 annotations to declare configuration inline with code instead of XML. Frameworks like Wicket and GWT are providing developers with Java solutions to UI that are devoid of XML configuration, JSP, and markup-heavy implementations. IMHO, Wicket deserves to be called a breath of fresh air.

I do think it's a mistake for J2EE to include a particular view framework in its specification. JSF, while an innovation in the 90's, is simply a pig wearing lipstick compared to some of the new frameworks out there. Frameworks that, for example, are built on AJAX instead of including it as an afterthought.

I suppose the bewildering set of choices may be the root of the problem here. But if you make the effort to do your research, you'll find that many of your assumptions are incorrect.

Re:If you want a GREAT development environment...

[FlyingGuy]

Correction to my last.. CodeGEAR.com I think I am getting old.

Re:But does it support JCV

[FatherOfONe]

I guess I do hate GCJ now that you mention it. The countless bugs I had to fight just to realize that it didn't work well has left scars on me that won't go away quickly.

I also know some people at RedHat (not well, I will admit) and their hate for Java makes view of GCJ appear to be love. They flat out HATE HATE HATE Java. Now they kept saying that they "couldn't ship Suns JVM", but the reality is that they don't want to ship one or include one easily like SuSE or Ubuntu.

If I implied that Eclipse had to be hacked to run on the JVM then I am sorry. I meant to say that RedHat hacked Eclipse to run under the GCJ, and thus lots of things didn't work well. The developer was left to think that Java + Eclipse was installed and would work great, yet it was this hacked version of Eclipse and GCJ that it was running on. The thing had a ton of bugs and would technically run, but not well.

Now it looks like RedHat/Fedora is looking at including the GPL version of Java, once they do that and then use this JVM as the main/core system for all Java programs then I will definitely change my tune on Redhat. Until then I will be skeptical.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that I am actually a Redhat fan and wish them well, but I ask you to talk to some of their engineers and ask them their opinion of Java. Now that they have bought Jboss it might be different, but a few years ago, I would equate it to walking in to Microsoft and asking them what they think of Linux if Linux just took 40% of their business.

Their mantra use to be "You get to Redmond through Palo Alto".