Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Yes I have been watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope lately in case you are wondering about the reference to Vader's "I find your lack of faith disturbing" comment. Anyway, recently I've come across a couple of situations where I was doing some consulting work and found that people were using -- no, relying completely -- on their IDE to perform builds of J2EE applications. One even included an EAR, EJB-JAR, and WAR file all being built exclusively by the IDE. Then Novajug launched a poll yesterday on what people were using as their build tool. As of about 10 minutes ago people using their IDE stood at 20%. Now granted the number of people who have voted thus far is small and the 20% only translates to 11 people. But I find even that number of people using only an IDE to build applications alarming and disturbing. As for my recent consulting, I won't mention the IDE by name, but it is a commercial IDE that allows you to define, using mounds of dialog boxes, in excruciating detail everything about your build, which is where they had put everything! And all of those settings were checked into version control no less.

The reason I was helping them out was because one developer's IDE would simply not build the WAR file, instead giving a single one line error message: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. Nice. Well, with this amount of detail I naturally was unable to help him out, and suggested in passing that they try switching their build system to Ant rather than the IDE. And there really isn't much more to say in this paragraph about it either, so I'll continue to the next one.

I suppose the reason I thought about writing this is because I pretty much assumed everyone nowadays uses Ant to build J2EE applications. Apparently I am wrong. Not the first time. Anyway, another tidbit about that project I was helping -- they had no "test" tree in their project, thus no, nada, zero unit tests. Maybe bad practices run amuck and are concentrated on a small set of projects, such that if someone is using only their IDE to do builds, perhaps it's not all that surprising they aren't unit testing either. But that's just random speculation.