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Ask Jazz Technical Lead Dr. Erich Gamma

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the sing-me-a-tune dept.

As IBM continues to build out Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked with Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr. Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. Update 19:05 GMT by SM: As pointed out by user Hop-Frog, Dr. Gamma is also co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

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  1. The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools.

    Eclipse has been going on since the early 2000s and six days ago enjoyed the release of Galileo (v3.5). If you've had time to look at recent release, what are your opinions on what Eclipse has become? Has it made any wrong turns? How do you respond to criticisms of "bloat" or "too resource intensive"? Do you see it becoming more than what it is or transforming?

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    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Plugins.

      Eclipse is an awesome platform for Java. As good as Netbeans. Over the years I've checked it out and I've never felt the desire to stay with it like I do with Netbeans.

      But when it comes to developing in other languages, Eclipse just doesn't cut and Netbeans blows the doors off of it.

      Some examples:

      When I downloaded the previous version of Galileo, from the menu I installed the plugins for C++. I couldn't get the C++ compiling and linking to work.

      BPEL?!?! They wanted me to GO BACK a couple of versions of Eclipse. I couldn't even find it on the net.

      Anyway, that's not the Eclipse foundations problem. What is their problem is the dependencies installation of the plugins. There's been times where I try to install a plugin and after a while it says I need another, the that dependency says I need a couple of more, and then those dependencies say I need more, and eventually, one dependency fails. Spent a couple of hours over that. What can't Eclipse do all that horseshit for me?

      There's other things that I don't like about the UI and the way Eclipse handles projects and their dependencies in Java. I went to Netbeans six months ago and never looked back. I am very happy with Netbeans and I don't see any reason to try to go back to Eclipse.

    2. Re:The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation by A+Big+Gnu+Thrush · · Score: 4, Funny

      Agreed. Not a troll. Valid criticisms of Eclipse.

      Netbeans, on the other hand, is only used by pedophiles, so GP should be ignored on those grounds.

  2. Cleaning Up Collaboration by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Jazz seems to rely heavily on developer community and their collaboration--and the influence for Jazz is said to be the World Wide Web.

    The Jazz portfolio consists of a common platform and a set of tools that enable all of the members of the extended development team to collaborate more easily.

    The biggest problem I have with collaboration tools is the metadata. No one does it right. Someone writes a blog or uploads a document but doesn't tag it. Enterprise search is broken. Management hands us wikis yet no one has the time or patience to maintain them. The protective blanket of "it's agile, baby" shields us from any beat downs. And with every new tool I realize that it's not the tool that improves collaboration, it's the team. Look at Slashdot's tagging system. Does it help me that one hundred stories are tagged with "no"? Collaboration seems to spontaneously work but is often out of your control when it does and doesn't. How does Jazz fix these problems? How does Jazz improve collaboration when it seems to me that tools are such a small part of collaboration? Will a small development team be able to use such a large set of tools?

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    My work here is dung.
  3. New Important Design Patterns? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On your influential book regarding design patterns, you listed 23 design patterns that would become the foundation for the concept of design patterns in computer science. Since then, many more types and subtypes have arisen but a lot of them seem to be derivatives or a combination of others. What new design patterns if any do you wish you had included in your book or that you feel are necessary for competent developers to learn?

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    My work here is dung.
  4. On the Current State of Academia? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know a lot of people that are very vocal about what is right and wrong with education today. Especially college institutions: "No one teaches C, everyone teaches four years of Java, no one understands the theory, a CS grad doesn't even know what a model-view-controller pattern is." The list goes on. Since you have your doctorate and have probably spent a lot of time in research and academia, what's wrong with most computer science or engineering programs in general today? What would you like to see more or less of? Are there any subject directions recently taken (EJB, garbage collectors, interpreted languages) you'd like to comment on?

    You seem to be non-opposed to Java which, I'll admit, is rare to me for someone with a doctorate. I would like to hear your views since so often all I hear about Java is that it is slow and only good for people that want cheap software developed quick by beginner developers.

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    My work here is dung.
  5. Will SWT and Swing ever merge in Eclipse? by Fuzuli · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have to build quite complex tools using GEF and GMF, and there are many cases where I'd like to have the power of Java2D, and reuse some of the great frameworks out there built on Swing.
    More and more people are using AWT/SWT bridge, since SWT does not provide an underlying drawing framework as rich as Java2D.
    Eclipse has great things like EMF, and the platform is number one choice for tooling, but when it comes to things like Bezier curves etc, Swing is much easier to use. So are we going to see more developer friendly versions of Eclipse where Swing is more available to us?