I am frustrated by the long build time that IDEA needs before starting my application. I do use DCEVM to enjoy changing code on the fly better than plain hot-swap does, but this doesn't work if I really do need to start my applications multiple times.
IDEA is supposed to be able to have incremental compilation, but I'm not seeing it. I see no options to enable this. Start or starting a debug of the application, takes nearly half a minute. Must it take so long? In theory, IDEA has all the class files already generated, except for the source files that were just edited. IDEA ought to be able to fill in the few blanks, and get the application running almost instantly. What's the hold up, why does it insist it must re-compile every single source file again?
ps. I'm using the Eclipse compiler in IDEA, so that it tolerates some source files not being compilable. I have to do that, because it is one giant tree of java files, where I can not control every one.
Then I saw that perhaps Gradle does have incremental compilation. So I thought to re-create my project, this time with Gradle. I am having a very difficult time figuring out how it works, how it integrates, what tasks are moved from IDEA to Gradle (if any). Even creating a simple skeleton test application with Gradle in IDEA is very frustrating. There are all sorts of fuzzy bits all over the place that leaves you guessing. The tutorials on Jetbrains are almost useless. I can't find one single clear to the point that just explains it in a nutshell how it works. I see some demos that says, click here, and here, and there, but the results on my end aren't the same as what I see outlined.
For instance, Gradle complains that it can't find the junit jar. Ok, so I go into the project settings, and attempt to add the junit jar to the classpath. Under Libraries, I then see an entry to "Gradle: junit:junit:4.11". But there is a second one: "junit-4.11". Why two? Can I delete one? Why is the one so verbal, colon this colon that, etc.
So I add the junit jar files I have to both.
But then in the Gradle Projects window, where I see the hierarchical breakdown of the gradle project setup, verification->test. This is then supposed to run the test class I did manage to create.
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:
Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':testCompileClasspath'.
> Could not resolve junit:junit:4.11.
Required by:
xpert_client4:xpert_client4:1.0-SNAPSHOT
> No cached version of junit:junit:4.11 available for offline mode.
* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
"Could not resolve junit:junit:4.11".
Gradle is extremely frustrating. If all I have to have, is to start a main() in a large project, why would I go through this trouble of using this gradle system that offers things I don't need? Why is it so convoluted, fuzzy, and confusing?
Same goes for an Android project. IDEA can compile and run an Android app without Gradle just fine. Simply avoid anything gradle when setting up, and it just works.
Plus there are all the things that one has to do to speed up the supposedly slow Gradle system. There is the daemon thing. Parallelize, and apparently you can set it in two ways (why). Configure on demand. Globalize. Minimize. minSdkVersion. Offline (oh no, not that Maven thing that pulls down jar files from the internet over and over). jCenter. Profile.... it goes on and on. All those workarounds, hacks, adjustments, tweaks.
Is there anything to be gained by gradle-ifying a working IDEA project? Would I get faster build and startup times if I go through all this trouble? Can I avoid Gradle altogether, and forever (in the hopes that it doesn't somehow becomes mandatory).
I've been coding since the 80s. I've used all sorts of systems. I've build my own build systems. I'm not green here. I also hate having RTFM, if those FMs don't get to the point, and don't explain things well - as if the ones that wrote it, don't really understand it themselves - they know what buttons to press to get it going and that's it.
I find this thing one of the most frustrating things I have seen in a long time. The previous horrible build system I've tried in the past, and have avoided like the plague since, is Maven. The lack of clear thinking with these systems is astounding.
So, aside from these frustrations, what I'm after is: is it worth figuring out Gradle and applying all the workarounds and tweaks, so that I may, once I go through this grief, enjoy faster build and startup times of my application?
Or, would I be better off, avoid Gradle altogether, and instead, do something like place the startup of my application in a loop, so that every time I exit that the application that it re-runs main(). I would then use DCEVM to code on the fly while possible.
Lastly, I forgot to mention. Enabling automatic build in IDEA works really badly. A build seems to always involve re-building every single file, over and over. And setting build to automatic, all it ends up doing is it redoing this in the background over and over. There is nothing that happens in an asynchronous way, where when I finish editing a source file, and start the debug of the application, where IDEA has done any of the building in the background ahead of time, because it redoes the whole thing again after every single tiny little code change. Plus it makes the CPUs spike to near 100% constantly.
IDEA is a great IDE, but the whole compile thing is a total nightmare front to back.
Make sure to disable anti-virus protection in your Gradle caches directory and your IntelliJ project directory. For me, this reduces Java compilation time dramatically, because of all the intermediate files and JARs associated with Java builds. Excluding those same directories from Windows Search indexing can also help.
As of September, 2020, this is the list of default directory locations that should be exluded from virus scanning and Windows search indexing, published here.
Gradle cache: %USERPROFILE%\.gradle
Android Studio projects: %USERPROFILE%\AndroidStudioProjects
Android SDK: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\SDK
Android Studio system files: %USERPROFILE%\.AndroidStudio<version>\system
I published some instructions on my blog for doing this for Windows Defender and Windows Search Indexing, which I'll repost here for completeness:
Windows Defender - How to Exclude a Directory
Open Windows Defender Settings
Click "Virus & threat protection"
Click "Virus & threat protection settings"
Scroll down to "Exclusions" and click "Add or remove exclusions"
Click "Add an exclusion" and select "Folder" from the drop-down menu
Navigate to the directory to be excluded, or paste its path into the "Folder" text-box, and click "Select Folder"
Windows Search Indexing - How to Exclude A Directory
Open Windows Control Panel
Search for "index" and choose "Indexing Options"
Click the "Modify" button
Under the appropriate drive letter, navigate to the folder you want to exclude, and make sure it is unchecked
Double-check your work by verifying the directory shows up in the "Exclude" column of the "Summary of selected locations" table
Even I was facing the same issue and found one option in Intellij IDE, which closely solves my issue, but not fully.
Build Project Automatically and Compile in Parallel
Though it does not solve fully, but I see some performance improvement in build time, whenever I add/upgrade dependency and run the tests.
Related
I'm doing a project with some colleagues using Java. After 1 month of working, suddenly almost all of us (the ones that mainly use eclipse as an IDE) got a weird problem : when we run the code, we run a previous version of it. You can imagine the confusion that appeared among us since the bad code was still running despite the good code written afterwards. We found a solution : Project > Clean in the Eclipse toolbar. Believe it or not but every time I have to add one line of code and run, I have to clean before. It becomes frustrating.
Here are my questions : is there something I can do to stop doing that every-time I want to run the code (like an automatic clean)? Why does it have this behaviour ? Why my colleagues that use IntelliJ don't have that problem ?
Thanks
Unless you are doing something more complicated than you let on, check Project > Build Automatically. This does what it says. If it is off, then you will have to do Project > Build All (or, Clean) manually.
If Build Automatically is checked, then your team may have done something to the project configuration that is affecting the build process.
We just started using Play Framework 2 (Java) with IntelliJ IDEA (14.1.1) on a new project.
As it is now, simple tasks like running tests always seem to start with a 20 second long "make" step, and then the tests itself takes a few milliseconds.
According to the "messages" view, the Play 2.0 compiler is handling compilation, even though this is not checked in the Play2 options in IDEA.
Is this normal?
Are there any known quickfixes for how to make this work in a practical way?
A workaround was described in the issue mentioned in my last comment.
Disable play2 compiler in settings
Delete the play*xml files in the .idea folder for your project
Restart IDEA
If you reimport the project (e.g. when build.sbt changes), you'll have to delete the xml files and restart IDEA again.
This will presumably be fixed - look for updates in the YouTrack Issue
IDE misconfiguration is a big source of inefficient time use in our team.
I wanted to know if other teams have tried to check the health of the eclipse workspace with continuous integration.
Eclipse is open source and extensible, and most (all?) of its files are in xml. So it should not be difficult to add a step to continuous integration that checks the health of the workspace, such as no missing Jar files, no errors, etc.
What we have is a separate ant script to do the real builds that go to QA and to the customers. This ant script is run with continuous integration and we have put in place a few simple checks that catch most big showstoppers.
The workspace configuration is a different story and we sometimes detect problems when it's too late (the dev left home).
EDIT: Note that we share our Eclipse config files.
There is some information on building with Eclipse from the command line here.
(Should be a comment, but I can't).
I don't see why you want to do that. Eclipse complains loudly if anything is broken, so leave it to the developer.
What you should consider instead, in my opinion is to write tests that check that everything is as you expect it to in the building process of those builds from source code that the developer has checked in the source repository.
If a build breaks due to a jar is missing in the build, add a check. If a build breaks because it is dependent on a certain feature in the JVM, add a check.
Only ship builds outside of the development team that pass all tests. Those builds that fail, should be fixed by the developer introducing the change that broke the build.
Since you are using Ant, you can create a custom task that verifies the following files against pre-defined ones. If they don't match, report problem:
workspace/.metadata/*.* (whichever configurations you think are important)
workspace/project/.classpath
workspace/project/.project
workspace/project/.settings/*.* (whichever configurations you think are important)
Of course, these files include some hard-coded paths, so you can use regular expressions in the pre-defined files.
If you want to check only simple things like "the project doesn't compile", then just compile the project in the ant script (using the javac task) and see if there are errors.
Another thing - continuous integration should better be IDE-agnostic. I.e. you must have a IDE-less environment (a CI Engine) that compiles the project. Imagine the following:
three developers, one of them accidentally removed a jar from his Eclipse, but the project in the repository is compiling. No need to report problems in that case
one of the developers adds a new jar and commits. The others have not updated. No problems are reported in there workspaces, although after they update, they might get the problem.
That all said, I think you'd better look at Hudson, which is a continuous integration engine. Thus you won't be dependent on IDE settings for your builds.
New to Java and Eclipse. For some reason, the first time I load Eclipse on a given day, it freezes at "Initializing Java Tooling : 59%". Eventually, it gets past this and I can do my work. However, this "Initializing Java Tooling : 59%" stage takes a REALLY REALLY REALLY long time. Does anybody know why it does this or how to fix it?
You can take several thread dumps of the Eclipse Java process to see what plugins are being executed. Here is some info on how to take thread dumps.
What happen is that Eclipse loads all project configurations and then for each project it initializes all declared builders. The builder loading and initialization is what takes most of the time. Some builders need to resolve and/or reload project dependencies such as jars and other projects and also check if project resources had changed. This process can also trigger initialization of builders on other projects and it may take longer depending on 3rd party plugins you are using.
It breaks on a per workspace basis. I have had some success removing plugin data. Usually this can be found by at:-
[workspace-directory]/.metadata/.plugins
If you delete everything except:-
org.eclipse.core.resources
You will keep your projects but everything else will be deleted (preferences, scm repositories ... etc.) and will need to be recreated/reimported (you will be greeted by the welcome page, but do not be alarmed).
There is probably a specific set of plugin data that should be deleted, but this fixed my last occurence, and so I have nothing else against which to further hone in on the problem state ... for the time being.
Following mike's advice, I resurrected my workspace by just deleting [workspace-directory]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core. That directory doesn't seem to store any important information.
I had this problem and found a solution here:
http://tedvinke.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/eclipse-initializing-java-tooling-hangs/
Here's what I did.
Rename the .projects folder in .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources
in the workspace folder. This doesn’t seem to affect any project and
the .project folder will be recreated when Eclipse restarts.
A more simple-minded approach than Eugene's very clever one is to remove all your plugins, one by one, keep notes, and watch performance after each removal. This should help pinpoint the plugin that's doing the big initialization. It's possible that you didn't really need that plugin after all.
In my experience, there is often a big delay associated with source control plugins because some feel the need to check project state against the repository on startup. There may be options to control this. You can also look at what kind of label decoration is in effect; if some decoration is dependent on repository state, that could be your time waster right there.
Be warned that this procedure may be destructive! You probably included those plugins for a reason, and if you remove the plugins it's possible you'll lose capabilities on already present projects, and that even replacing the plugins will not necessarily restore everything in all projects to the former state. As the disk repartition people say: We assume that you have everything backed up!
How about doing the following
eclipse.exe -clean
Just uncheck "Build Automatically" and force quit Eclipse. Then start it again.
Project>Build Automatically - uncheck
-force quit
-start Eclipse
I'm soon going to check in the very first commit of a new Java project. I work with Eclipse Ganymede and a bunch of plug ins are making things a little bit easier.
Previously I've been part of projects where the entire Eclipse project was checked in. It's quite convenient to get the project settings after a check out. However this approach still was not problem free:
I strongly suspect that some Eclipse configuration files would change without user interaction (from when I used Eclipse Europa), making them appear as changed (as they were changed, but not interactively) when it's time to do a commit.
There are settings unique to each development machine as well as settings global for all developers on a project. Keeping these apart was hard.
Sometime if the Eclipse version was different from others Eclipse would get angry and mess up the project configuration. Another case is that it change the format so it gets updated, and if commited messes up the configuration for others.
For this specific project I have another reason not to commit the project files:
There might be developers who prefer NetBeans which will join the project later. However they won't join within the coming months.
How do you organize this? What do you check into versioning control and what do you keep outside? What do you consider best practice in this kind of situation?
At a minimum you should be check-in the .project and .classpath files. If anybody on your team is hard-coding an external JAR location in the .classpath you should put them up against the wall and shoot them. I use Maven to manage my dependencies but if you are not using maven you should create user libraries for your external JARs with with a consistent naming convention.
After that you need to consider things on a plug-in by plug-in basis. For example I work with Spring so I always check-in the .springBeans and likewise for CheckStyle I always check-in the .checkstyle project.
It gets a bit trickier when it comes to the configuration in the .settings folder but I generally check-in the following if I change the default settings for my project and want them shared with the rest of the team:
.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.ui.prefs - it contains the settings for the import ordering
.settings/org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs - it contains the settings for the compiler version
In general I haven't noticed Ganymede modifying files without me modifying the project preferences.
I recommend to use maven so that the entire life cycle is outside of any IDE. You can easily create an eclipse project with it on the command line and you can use whatever you want, if it's not eclipse. It has it's quirks but takes out a lot of bitterness when it comes to dependencies and build management.
In our world, we check in the entire Eclipse project and the entire parallel but separate Netbeans project. Our motivations for this were entirely focused on "when I do a checkout, I want a functional configuration immediately afterward." This means that we had to do some work:
Create runnable configurations for each primary IDE (people like what they like). This includes main class, working directory, VM parameters, etc.
Create useful start up scripts for all of our relevant scenarios.
Create edited datasets that don't cause the checkout to take too much longer (it's a big project).
This philosophy was worth cash money (or at least labor hours which are almost more valuable) when our new hire was able to check out the project from Subversion into Eclipse and immediately run a functional system with a (small) real data set without any fuss or bother on his part.
Follow up: this philosophy of "make the new guy's life easier" paid off again when he changed IDEs (he decided to try Netbeans after using Eclipse for quite a long time and decided to stick with it for a while). No configuration was required at all, he just opened the Netbeans project in the same directory that Eclipse had been pointing to. Elapsed switchover time: approximately 60 seconds.
I only ever check in things are done by humans, anything else that is generated (whether automaticly or not) should be easy to regenerate again and is liable to change (as you've stated). The only exeption to this is when the generated files are hard (requires alot of human intervention ;) ) to get it right. How ever things like this should really be automated some how.
Try to port your project to a build system like maven. It has everything you need to get the same experience of the project on every machine you use.
There are plugins for just everything. Like the eclipse plugin. You just type "mvn eclipse:eclipse" and the plugin generates your entire ready to work eclipse project.
To give the answer to your question. Never check in files that are not being used by your project at any time in the development cycle. That means that metadata files like eclipse properties etc. should never be checked in in a SCM.
I like checking in the .project, .classpath, and similar files only if they will be identical on any Eclipse user's machine anyway. (People using other IDEs should be able to check out and build your project regardless, but that issue is orthogonal to whether or not to check in Eclipse-only files.)
If different users working on the project will want to make changes or tweaks to their .project or .classpath or other files, I recommend that you do not check them into source control. It will only cause headaches in the long run.
I use IntelliJ, which has XML project files. I don't check those in, because they change frequently and are easy to recreate if I need to.
I don't check in JAR files. I keep those in a separate repository, a la Maven 2.
I don't check in WARs or JARs or javadocs or anything else that can be generated.
I do check in SQL and scripts and Java source and XML config.
I'd suggest having the actual project files ignored by the version control system due to the downsides you mentioned.
If there is enough consistent information in the project settings that there would be benefit from having it accessible, copy it to a location that Eclipse doesn't treat as special, and you'll have it available to work with on checkout (and copy back to where Eclipse will pay attention to it). There is a decent chance that keeping the actual project files separate from the controlled ones will result in loss of synch, so I'd only suggest this if there is clear benefit from having the settings available (or you're confident that you'll be able to keep them synchronised)
In our case, we used to check in the project files (.project and .classpath) to make it easy for all developers to create their project workspace. A common preferences file and team project set were located in source control as well, so creating your workspace was as simple as import preferences and import team project set. This worked very well, but does rely on everyone having a consistent environment, any customizations would have to be applied after the basic workspace is created.
We still do this for the most part, but Maven is now used so of course dependency management is handled via Maven instead. To avoid conflicting information, the .project and .classpath were removed from source control and are now generated via maven goals before we import the team project set. This would easily allow for different environments, as you would simply need scripts to generate the IDE specific portions based on the Maven configuration.
PS-For ease of maintenance though, I prefer having everyone use the same environment. Anything else inevitably becomes a full time maintenance job for someone.
Netbeans 6.5 has an improved Eclipse project import which is supposed to sync changes from Netbeans back to Eclipse: http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteWorthyNB65#section-NewAndNoteWorthyNB65-EclipseProjectImportAndSynchronization
Don't. Only check in the source code of your projects.
As a response to:
"There are settings unique to each development machine as well as settings global for all developers on a project. Keeping these apart was hard."
Eclipse offers a number of ways to keep local settings manageable: Java Classpath Variables (Java > Build Path > Classpath Variables) are one, 'Linked Resources' (General > Workspace > Linked Resources) are another http://help.eclipse.org/stable/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/concepts/concepts-13.htm Creating a README that states which settings to set before building/running the project works pretty well in my opinion.
Now how to make sure your continuous build system understands the changes that were made to the eclipse settings, thats another issue... (I have a separate build.xml for ant that I keep up to date by hand)