Soapbox Rants and Raves

To be honest, this was not a topic I was actually planning to write about. However, because I received a couple of interesting comments on a recent blog entry, Unfriendly Developer Practices, I thought I should clarify my position.

One of the comments suggested that there should be should be no dependency between the build system and the IDE. Another person suggested the disconnect between the IDE and the build system creates a convenient place for dependency inconsistencies to develop unchecked.

I completely agree with both of those statements and have seen both problems manifested several times. However, there are two simple tools can make this a non-issue: Continuous Integration and Dependency Management.

• Continuous Integration is obvious; if that lazy developer forgets to check in a dependency or update the build scripts, the build fails. Not perfect, but the problem is immediately detected and the relevant people are notified of the situation. The problem can be resolved within minutes.
• The Silver Bullet for me, was the addition of the Ivy Dependency Management tool into our build process. Because the build system and IDE share the same dependency configuration, the project’s dependencies were now managed in single place. Using the IvyDE plug-in, Eclipse simply worked, with no additional configuration. Using the externalized dependencies and basic Ant targets, the project could create a robust, change resilient build system. To achieve this level of robustness, I took advantage of the Ivy post resolve tasks. It was not until I discovered how easily they could isolate the build scripts from the actual dependencies, did it all come together. The real beauty of this approach is that no files (dependencies) are directly referenced. The post resolve tasks create variables which contain all of the appropriate files; the build script can then treat these variables generically, without concern. Nice and clean!

It was an unstated, fundamental requirement to have no “direct” dependency on Eclipse; such that we could all revert back to the wonderful world of Emacs tomorrow, should the need arise. I don’t think which IDE a project chooses to use, is really that important. I am apparently an Eclipse snob; but all I really care about is having Emacs key-bindings! If a majority of the team works on the same platform, I do believe there is real value around this continuity; that just happens to be Eclipse for me!

I have several other reasons for checking in configuration files:

• It quickly highlights wrong doing! If a developer checks in something specific to their environment, they will break everyone on the team. My goal is for complete project neutrality: check out on any machine, in any directory, and the project is guaranteed to build and deploy.  Additionally, check the project out in Eclipse and it should build with no issues, within minutes.
• Not all developer’s actually care about tools. Some developers simply want their environment setup for them. They have no desire to figure out how Eclipse formats code when you save a file or how to configure and run quality checks after each build; implementing business solutions is their primary concern.
• Enhanced team productivity. If everyone’s world (environment) is the same, it is so much easier to spin up a new developer or help a teammate with a problem. Would you really want each developer to go through the discovery process of setting up the project? In the big picture, isn’t this really just wasted time?
• Helping to ensuring quality coding practices and standards. We also check in the Checkstyle, PMD, and Findbugs configuration and rule sets. Taking advantage of the sharable configuration files, both the Eclipse plug-ins and Ant tasks work from the same rule sets, ensuring complete consistency across the team, no matter where the rules are executed.

I appreciate all of the recent comments; thanks for taking the time to reply. They enable me think about and reconsider the decisions I have made, giving me yet another opportunity to learn from my mistakes!  As far as Eclipse configuration files are concerned, I strongly believe there is far more project value gained by including them, as compared to requiring each developer manage their own environment. One final note, I have no issue with developers wanting to manage their own world, more power to them!  I would hope that these efforts would be to make the overall, shared environment a little better; after all, everyone should be contributing to all aspects of the project! The real point is that everyone should not be required to configure a project, unless they really want or need to.