rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Saturday, 16 November 2002

Erik pointed to two cool Java projects today: Greg [~] FlockmdashJ2EE RSS Aggregator and Mobile Java Programming Contest. Tried in vain to get the Flock WAR deployed on Orion and Tomcat - no dice, Tapestry is blowing up somewhere. Seems to be looking for hard coded c:flock? Java Jukebox 1.0.3, a Java-based office music server. This looks cool - pity about the console client and completely befuddling way of adding songs! 2:40:18 PM  comment []      Man am I jealous: Just got home from my second day at JavaPolis. It was very interesting, and very cool to meet all the opensource guys. I did a presentation on SiteMesh and Maven, and although I didn't prepare very well IMO, the presentation was a succes. A couple of us (Joe Walnes, Paul Hammant (I always confused him with a 'Mark'...he looks like my nephew), Scott Farquhar, Rickard Öberg, Aslak Hellesøy, Werner Ramaekers, Vincent Harq and I had dinner last night and a drink afterwards, and we had very much fun. We should do this again. BTW I met Erich Gamma, and talked with him about Eclipse (SWT) and Maven. Very cool guy. From all accounts it was an awesome conference - like JavaOne but with intelligent sessions and boatloads of smart people (see all the bloggers above?). Have to grill Scott about it thoroughly when he gets back to Sydney. Next year fella's, next year. 12:44:29 AM  comment []      Ahh.... Where was I?. Everyone talking about IntelliJ IDEA. You know that it costs $600(!!!!), right? Soon to go up to $700. I get 80% of its features in Eclipse for $0. I like IDEA and 3.0 looks incredible, but it just can't win from a price/performance standpoint. [Russell Beattie Notebook] $600 is the top price - and that includes upgrades for a year I think - but let's do a little ROI analysis here. Even if you think Eclipse has 80% of IDEAs features (which is generous), that means you're buying 20% more 'functionality' for $600. I'm guessing your average quality developer is on at least $80,000 a year - approximately 200 days in a year, this means you would need to 'save' 2 days (16 hours?) work to pay for the $600. If IDEA saves you 30 minutes a day, it pays for itself in roughly 4 weeks. Even if it only saves you 5 (!) minutes a day, it pays for itself in half a year. Like life, you get what you pay for   12:25:02 AM  comment []      IDEA 3.0 was released recently. it is an awesome piece of work, and it is refreshing to see such a vibrant company (jetbrains) at work, innovating consistently and always coming up with cool new ideas. i use IDEA every day, and couldn't do without it! when the cost of a typical developer is $80-150k a year, IDEA pays for itself in just a few days. the eclipse vs. IDEA debate brings some interesting questions to bear, namely whether these huge IBM-funded open source projects are ultimately a good thing or not. if eclipse continues to copy the innovations coming out of jetbrains and incorporate them into eclipse, does it end up suppressing one of the few true innovators in the marketplace? [what's next?] I have to agree with Graham in a way - Eclipse does seem to be copying IDEAs features a LOT. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. Graham, Eugene and I (and our collective companies) share one large thing in common, we compete head to head with large Open Source projects - and when you're competing against Open Source it is a constant battle to innovate. That's the only way you can win, innovate and stay ahead.  It's challenging and brilliantly exciting to compete with OSS projects for a software company - indeed, challenging means very, very scary for some - usually large and staid - companies (see Oracle trying to level the playing field in the IDE market place with it's latest JSR on a common IDE plugin architecture). 12:13:55 AM  comment []