Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
when every one of us program in java he would need a library (some jars) to complete his work .
so when this programmer find some libraries he need . how he can find the best of these libs ?
thanks.
I don't program in Java much but I do need to hunt down libraries for C++ and Python, which are my mainstays.
I think some criteria you can apply to stuff you find on Google or community sites like SO and java.net include the following:
How well documented is the project? Is it just API documentation? Does it have samples? Are they documented or just spat out? Are there tutorials?
When was the last stable/unstable/testing release? Do version control logs indicate activity in the project? (Google Code projects have a indicator on the right side of the page which shows project activity) Are their mailing lists active? Do a lot of people ask questions and questions get answered? Are developers talking on their mailing lists?
Is the API to your liking? This is both a matter of personal preference and objective measuring. As an example, for C++ GUIs, some people like the API of wxWidgets more, whereas some people like the API of Qt more, and there are people who are more productive in each, but there are also good reasons to believe objectively why one is better than the other API-wise.
Is the project "famous"? This is kind of iffy because it relies on groupthink, but there is some merit to considering projects based on how "famous" or "well-known" or "widely-used" they are. It helps because this is normally an indicator of reliability (emphasis on normally, i.e. not always). The communities will probably be more active and knowledgeable. You can tap onto existing programmers who are already probably familiar with these APIs and hire them or recruit them, etc. For example, I suppose that other than being generally quite good, a lot of people go for Lucene as their text search system because it is very widely used.
How mature is the project? Is it in alpha? Beta? Pre-release? Sometimes you find a library you really like but it's very raw. Depending on the nature of your project, you may want to reconsider using it.
All that said, generally good places to find good Java libraries are probably projects from Apache and those published by Google.
This is all I have for now. Take them with a pinch of salt. If I have anything else to add I will edit this post.
Hope this helps!
I rarely need additional "Generic" libraries. If that's what you are after you might keep an eye on the Apache stuff--there are a few groups like that that just do generally good work, but most of the stuff you could get in a general library like that you can write yourself just as quickly as you can learn to use their stuff.
Occasionally I need a specific library like an SNMP library or something to provide a specific service--these are actually NEEDed because rewriting them would be prohibitive. These are much more important to choose correctly, but generally there aren't so many to choose from and a co worker will almost certainly have some experience or opinions if you don't.
Researching stuff like this should be a scheduled part of every project--the need to do the research should be identified in the early phases of the project.
Related
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I am a big fan of the http://www.stripesframework.org and using it heavily for my projects. However the project seems to be dead. It is not possible to register to the website anymore (no license) and I couldnt contact any of the administrators. Also the mailing-list is not available.
Is anyone aware of the status of the project?
It would be a pity if it was dead as I think it is one of the most elegant frameworks for java web development.
We're using the Stripes Framework on a large Java project. The Stripes project is actually very active. 1.5.4 should be out soon, and the mailing list is where most of the communication takes place.
The website is pretty old, but if the #1 failure of the framework is in marketing itself I don't think that's the worst thing that could be wrong with it. If you'd like to contribute by helping out with a site redesign the planning is going on now.
The mailing list is a great place for questions, and the irc channel #stripes on freenode is pretty active during business hours.
The framework does what it's intended to do very well. There is discussion on new features, but I think a lot of people are happily using it as it is.
Just to note we use Stripes with Spring for dependency injection it works very well.
Not at all, The Stripes Framework is activly developed and the mailing list is very active. Information how to subscribe to the very active Stripes mailing list can be found here:
http://www.stripesframework.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=511
Or go directly to the Stripes mailing list # gmane.org:
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.stripes.user
Stripes is the main Java web framework choosen in the company i'm actually working in.
It is used on many websites here, including medium sized projects like the french Renault and SFR websites (both ~40 people teams).
Everybody here quite like this framework that integrates nicely with Spring (IoC, Security).
As ScArcher2 said, you can come to the IRC channel #stripes on freebode, it's active with an average of 15 people here (mostly USA business hoursi noticed), including Frederic Daoud who wrote the Stripes book and Ben Gunter, Stripes commiter, and some other people that will be able to give you some advises or friendly discussions.
Stripes documentation is not exhaustive (imho) but it's easy to look at the framework's code and see how it works internally. However if you need help to do something you will find that on the irc channel
The bug fixes comes relatively fast, not like some other projects like Hibernate where some bugs can remain for many years.
Btw if you really like simple Java web frameworks, you should also take a look at Play!
I agree with you. Stripes is also one of the best framework in java. Unfortunately some people have no knowledge on this frame work. so that they are using struts ..etc.....Coming days most of the companies used this framework.
http://www.stripesframework.org/jira/browse/STS?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel
Still alive I believe. 1.5.3 just made it into maven central, and they're working on 1.6.
They sure could do a better job of updating their main site though.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm in the process of putting together a year long PRACTICAL course (not academic) to produce Java programmers who can be productive from day 1. I've found that often computer science university graduates know all about the Fourier transformation, but as interesting as that may be, doesn't help me integrate them onto real life projects.
Apart from obvious programming I have thought of a number of other topics
Testing
Continuous integration
Source control
What to do if you have a problem (e.g. this site)
Agile and other methodologies
Documentation
If you can think of any others please let me know.
debugging techniques
The theory that's probably necessary:
How to sort an array with something that's not O(n^2)
The very basic data structures; array, list, tree, stack, queue, heap are the first to mind.
If not how to write them, then absolutely why you'd use a tree over a list over an array, or vice-versa.
The practical knowledge that's also necessary:
The book The Pragmatic Programmer covers most of what you're asking here.
Eclipse. How to work a debugger. How to work a profiler.
Ant.
Some basic web framework; Struts, Spring, etc.
Apache Commons, JAXB, a SOAP library, a REST library.
How to read bad, uncommented code. How to refactor it bit by bit to be maintainable.
What a good comment is.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, in that order.
Validators (W3C), formatters (Jalopy), checkers (PMD, FindBugs).
How to use a piece of Bug Tracking software; how to write a good bug description, how to explain what you've done to fix it, and how to handle user expectations.
Actually, that deserves it's own line; how to handle user expectations and conflicting timelines and goals.
You need to teach them how to:
Read other people's code for comprehension
Work within a legacy code base (the steps, from reading to building to running tests to modifying)
In addition to what you have, working in teams on a mid-size project. This will also (hopefully) help them see the benefits of source control, testing, and documentation.
Another answer mentioned debuggers. In the same respect, I would also give an overview of profilers.
One thing I wish my professors covered more in my programming courses was using IDEs effectively. My professors mentioned that we should check out Eclipse, but never really taught us how to use it to its full potential. Even now I frequently find new features of my frequently used IDEs that save me a LOT of time doing trivial tasks.
Once you get past the skillset needed to be a coder, I think the next step is learning to code smarter and not harder.
Code reviews.
Receiving and giving code reviews is not very easy and quite often people get annoyed quite easily, especially the one whose code is being reviewed. But it is very useful to be forced to take on criticism and to explain your decisions. For the reviewer it requires you to read other people's code and to be able to point out the problems in it and of course to describe why you think the developer has done something wrong.
I'd dedicate a fair chunk of time to UML and pseudocode design. Writing a quick spec or even a few lines of pseudocode takes some practice and has tons of benefits.
Another thing I'd recommend is build procedure. While this stuff varies from place to place, a primer on things like Ant, continuous integration, etc would be great.
Sounds like you want to teach software engineering more than Java. You have covered most of the main topics however, I would suggest the following as well:
Software Architecture: There is design and then there is architecture. Understanding how different components will/should interact in a project is important
Requirements gathering: Getting the actual spec from the "business owners" is a valuable skill. Too many people think that actual requirements for a project will just be given to them.
JDBC/Databases: You have to touch on databases if they are going to be useful on day 1.
MVC: I don't think it is important to go through all design patterns however, it is definitely worth mentioning MVC. It is an incredibly important pattern for Web development and really can be applied to most anything.
1 year is not a lot of time to turn someone into a software engineer. There is a lot of practical experience that has to be developed and generally speaking, that is why a Bachelors is 3-4 years.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
what is the best way to understand a big company project in java?
There's a nice podcast/interview with Dave Thomas ("The Pragmatic Programmer" Dave) about this topic, here.
He calls it "software archaeology".
For many different reasons organizations frequently lose control of their code bases. Knowledge gets forgotten, people leave. One could very easily mistake the code base for an archaeological concern were it not for the fact that mission critical applications built upon it keep chugging along until something needs to be modified or enhanced and then suddenly you have a vat of source code that no one understands but that has become the most important thing in the world overnight.
There are very few short cuts for coming to terms with big vats of code. Generally, one has to balance the quest for "understanding it" with the pressure to make pointed pragmatic changes to "complete the mission".
You'll never know every line of every piece of code at a company. What you CAN do is understand the classes, what they do, and how they relate to each other.
Start by getting the most basic understanding of the way the code flows from a class perspective focusing on the large classes that do that majority of the work. Once you understand what's happening there start focusing on smaller classes. Keep this up until you have a pretty good understanding of a handful of classes.
Additionally you can break it down in to common programming tasks that your company has. Once you have a list of these research what's involved in implementing each of them.
The final thing is just experience. You can study the code as long as you want, but there's no substitute for playing with the actual code. Writing programs, testing things out, and looking at how existing code runs are the best way to learn a new system.
Start writing unit tests - you do something useful (which will probably earn you more time to understand the code) and you get an in-depth look into the functionality. Also, start asking questions when they come up during that process, you will be able to ask very specific questions and you might impress your colleagues :)
Few places I often start from is the build/package/deploy scripts and configuration files - depending on the size of the application we are talking about, they can tell you a lot about the internal structure, external dependencies and highlight things to dig in further.
Next you can use code coverage tool and record the coverage for a simple scenario, which points roughly which areas are performing it. A variation of this is running under tracing profiler. Heap dumps are also useful for getting an idea of the basic data structures.
Finally, look application logs during various scenarios, though these are usually too much information and you need to know what are you looking for.
All these should give you a good idea of the overall application. After that, you need to fire up a debugger and start poking in the code. Ask your colleagues for their favourite breakpoint locations - usually everybody has some.
In case you are doing Java or C#, make sure you know your IDE and how to use find-usages. There are further more advanced tools for static analysis and comprehension like Structure101 (my favourite), SonarJ or LattixDSM.
Some UML reverse-engineering tools can generate class diagrams, but usually they create too much noise and doing the pruning manually assumes you can discern the important from the unimportant (which usually is not the case with new codebase). If you get one of these, I recommend starting with essential class and using the "Add dependencies" functionality to incrementally explore the application.
Take a simple first task, and don't rush anywhere. Look around, use the time to learn and understand the environment. Examine the call stack, use a debugger. And when you have a solution, ask your peers for a code review, and learn from them.
Then take another task, and another one, and another...
You'll get there soon :)
Documentation my friend, look for manager patterns seek the jsp play with the code dont be afraid to make small changes and see what happens, understand the logic and the building blocks, stay way from companies with poor documentation.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I was just reading a post from Justin Etheredge in which he wrote "... I get so jealous when I talk to the Java guys at work and see all of the freaking awesome tools that they have for free on their platform. Since I use the NUnit, NCover, NHibernate, NAnt stack when doing most .NET development, sometimes I feel like we are just a bunch of copycats".
What other cool frameworks exist that aren't on .NET and I may not know about? Can we leave out things which have a direct or pretty reasonable analogue, just the kewl shiznit!
PS we aren't so bad. I'm pretty sure NDepend started out on .NET and has moved to Java
PPS one answer per item please! It makes it a lot easier to discuss them!
http://ruby.sadi.st/Heckle.html
Think you write good tests? Not bloody
likely... Put it to the test with
heckle. It’ll put your code into
submission in seconds.
The premise is really really simple to
understand:
★ Your tests should pass. ★ Break your
code. ★ Now they should fail.
You could check this by hand, but why
bother? Use heckle and put it to the
test:
heckle -f ClassName
For each failure heckle points out,
you've got a test to write.
Chances are, your tests suck.
Maybe you should ask the Java folks (add some Java tag), .NET tag watchers may not know about Java frameworks .NET does not have :)
Liquibase - A library for tracking, managing and applying database changes.
A decent embedded webserver, such as Jetty
A build system equivalent to Maven
An embedded AD/LDAP server for development purposes, such as ApacheDS
http://www.terracotta.org/ A kind of distributed JVM which shares objects automatically across a farm. Or something. Reading http://willcode4beer.com/design.jsp?set=kill_your_db makes it sound pretty cool.
At work, we use the ATG e-commerce platform, JBoss to run our local builds and Maven to build everything. We also have components from the Struts framework.
Personally speaking, I prefer the Spring Framework. IOC is my new favourite pattern!
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
The company I just started working for is using Stripes for parts of its web page development these days, and while it seems to be a nice enough web framework it no one really uses it-- it is almost non existent on the 'net. It's not even first in it's google search and the result you do get is for its old home page.
So, do any of you people use Stripes? Of your own volition? Do you know of any good tutorials / examples?
I recommend checking out the book referenced by jko:
a book from The Pragmatic Bookshelf called Stripes: ...and Java web development is fun again
Whilst still in 'beta' the book covers everything very well.
Another good place to start is this ONJava article.
I have used Stripes on a few projects now and have liked it a lot.
It may sound crazy but the Stripes quickstart and sample application documentation on the website does a pretty good job of covering the bases.
This is helped by the fact there is little to Stripes, probably because it is relatively new and not trying to be all things to all people. I would say give the quick-start a try and if by the end of it you are unsatisfied look elsewhere. At the end of the day you and your company have to be happy (and productive) with what you are using irrespective of how many people are using it.
I've never used (or even heard of) Stripes.
Regardless, there's a book from The Pragmatic Bookshelf called Stripes: ...and Java web development is fun again that may be worth checking out. You could also check out the Stripes mailing list archive.
It's a shame that some people perceive Stripes as a framework for which "there really just isn't much support or information for it." In reality, the Stripes community is very supportive - have a look at the mailing list and you'll see how friendly and responsive people are. In fact, some have said on the #stripes IRC channel that they have had better response for Hibernate-related questions than on #hibernate itself!
Give Stripes a good, serious look instead of dismissing it because of misconceptions.
Stripes is a great framework. We converted a major project from a home grown framework to stripes and it took less than one week.
The book referenced above is a great resources, as is the mailing list.
There's also an active irc channel #stripes on freenode.
It's a very powerful framework that doesn't get in your way.
We considered it when we were looking at open source frameworks. But we saw the same thing your did that there really just isn't much support or information for it. You should always weight the community support factor surrounding open source projects before picking one. (which is what you are doing here)