Maven 2: I Need to Try This

Feel this pain much?

Dependency management has a long tradition of being a complicated mess for anything but the most trivial of projects. "Jarmageddon" quickly ensues as the dependency tree becomes huge, complicated, and embarrassing to architects who are scorned by new graduates who "totally could have done it better." "Jar Hell" follows, where versions of dependencies on one system are not quite the same versions as those used for development; they have either the wrong version or conflicting versions between similarly named JARs. Hence, things begin breaking and pinpointing why proves difficult. Maven solves both of these problems by having a common local repository from which to link to the correct projects, versions and all.

From an article by Eric Redmond. Yet another tool I need to try ... sigh.

A History Lesson

By wandering around the original wiki, you can read many conversations that have informed modern software development. Try reading Code Smell, or One Responsibility Rule, or even take a look at the birth of Extreme Programming. If you're at all interested in the ideas that formed and support these principles of object-oriented programming, it's a very interesting place to roam and read.

A Project to Manage Eclipse Workspaces

I found this from reading the Open Source at Eclipse Blog (generally an excellent read, by the way). There is an eclipse project for bundling projects together, possibly from various sources, into a single eclipse workspace. The project is called Buckminster and certainly looks worth a try. See the project's home page and the referenced blog post for more details. (Hmm, I just discovered that Camino won't spell-check my form ... hm. Perhaps it's time to once again consider Safari. :-/ )

Eclipse Plugins

Some must-have plugins for Eclipse, including their update sites:

Mylar

I'll let them describe themselves.

Mylar is a task focused UI for Eclipse that makes working with very large workspaces as easy as working with small ones. It supports task management and monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand. Mylar uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what's related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylar also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

Eclipse 3.2RC2: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.2 Eclipse 3.1.x: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/mylar/update-site/e3.1

Subclipse

Subversion plugin. Eclipse 3.x: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.0.x