Once again, an extraordinary amount of time has passed since my last post. This time, though, I have a really good excuse - in that time, I have switched jobs, and it's taken a while for me to get back into a normal pattern. I am still developing in Java, but now solely as a web service backend, working with a flex frontend.
Learning to code in flex has been very interesting to say the least. Some of the things that are so annoying to get right in other platforms are just an easy, simple tag in flex. Of course, as with anything else, there are drawbacks. There can be times when something messes up in flex for no particular reason, and it takes forever to track down, eating up a good chunk of the productivity gained from the easy nature of flex. Also, there is some concern about the portability to other platforms, though we have not experienced that as of yet. So far, I'm fairly happy with the new processes.
One big change with this new job is that I have switched away from using Eclipse, and I now use Intellij IDEA full time. The difference in my productivity has been remarkable. IDEA is not free, which is a big drawback compared to Eclipse, but in my mind the cost is easily worth it. Particularly for development in multiple languages - IDEA intelligently handles Java, Flex, PHP and Javascript practically out of the box, with all the normal IDE bells and whistles, such as code completion, go to function definition, etc. Eclipse can do these things, but it always seemed to take a huge amount of effort to get it to work properly with any language other than Java. If you've never tried IDEA, I highly recommend you go give it a shot. They have a 30 day free trial.
Anyway, that's the state of things. Hopefully I can get back into writing a few more posts now and then. Thanks for reading!
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