Now That's What I Call A Compilation, Vol 1

One of the things I'm having to get used to all over again in my mutation from a CF guy to a Java guy, is having an intervening compilation stage inbetween making my changes and testing them. It's how I started out, of course, going back through C/C++ and right back to COBOL, but in the 6yrs I've been doing CF, I'd got kind of comfy with making a change, ALT+TABbing to the browser and hitting F5, and seeing the effects straight away. And if there was any issue, just sticking a <CFDUMP><CFABORT> in and hitting F5 again.

But on an enterprise Java system with around 2000 classes, the build time can easily be a couple of minutes. This can get quite irritating at times. All the time I'm waiting for the compiler, I can feel my mental logic tree (e.g. "if X happens, then my assumption about Y was correct which means that Z shouldn't happen, so if I see THAT then I need to think again about A, B and C....") fading out of focus and getting replaced with trivia.... or a mental picture of a nice big steaming hot cappucino... or ham slapping, or whatever...

Luckily, there are compensations in the Java world which make up for the extra build step.

Having a fully-featured debugger helps a lot. We use IntelliJ IDEA as our IDE (Eclipse just gets too slow, unfortunately) and the debugger in that is excellent.

You can step forwards AND backwards through your code, evaluating expressions and variables and function calls at any point, getting a tree view of all in-scope variables' and properties' values, and you can change the value of any simple variable at any time.

This came in SO handy the other day when I was trying to parse a MIME multipart message generated by AppleMail, which is notoriously bad at handling attachments in a standards-compliant way. Narrowing it down to one particular header, stepping backwards and forwards over the exception-throwing line, changing one character at a time until I'd cracked it..... it almost made me forget the good-old <CFDUMP><CFABORT> combo - almost!

The other thing I'm appreciating more and more is that with a little effort, and a liberal sprinkling of creamy Open-Source goodness, this build stage can automated to a remarkable degree.

We have an ANT script to perform the compilation, compile bindings, package classes into jars, put everything together in the right way for whichever app server you are deploying onto, etc etc. We use Subversion for version control and Trac for issue tracking, which work together fantastically well.

If you're cunning, you can also set things up so that every time a revision is committed to the SVN repository, a full build is performed on the repository server, and all the unit tests run in the background, with any errors getting automatically emailed to the development team - so you know if anything you've committed has broken something else. Maybe this could be achieved with CFCUnit, I don't know - anyone tried it?