My team is a very ".Net" group. Out of the 6 team members (including
me), we have a web developer/designer (MCAD, very experience guy, can
code in vb.net or c#, designed and developed countless website), 2 of
my friends who experienced in vb.net, and another 1 guy and another
female member, whom are also very valuable. There is absolutely no
problem with team cohensiveness as we all know each other strength and
things are agreed and done in a very efficient manner. Meet, Decide,
Do, Done. For the first 3 weeks, the boring part of documentations,
UMLs , class diagrams and sequence diagrams are daunting, but we get in
done in a relatively short time. Everyone is self-motivated and would
volunteer for different parts of the project.
Now comes the coding phase and that is when the pain comes in. As I had
mentioned before, we are a ".Net" group. Comes to J2EE, headache. We
need to develop Entity Beans and since we do not want to go into the
details of managing sql statements, we opt for CMP. The database we use
is Pointbase. Problem is, no one knows how to use Pointbase (although
we are eager to learn). This is a school project, so we got no choice.
Server is Sun AppServer. My previous experience is using Weblogic and
SqlServer, so I am new to appserver-pointbase combination. So we do wat
we should do. Create a database, create a schema and create the entity
beans and deploy. We expected a lot of errors to come and they did. A
lot of deployment errors. For some reason, no one understand what the
error messages are trying to say and dr google reveals to us a lot of
similar threads online but with no solution. Ok, that is the first
thing we got to accept. Error messages that nobody understand.
Secondly, we are using Netbeans IDE. I decided to switch from Jbuilder
to Netbeans as it is more lightweight and is bundled with AppServer and
pointbase. The problem is, its intellisense takes 3-5 second s to
appear, sometimes don't at all. Perhaps I am spoil by VS.Net but the
slow code hinting time is not acceptable for me. Also, it seems to take
up a lot of resources. Our workstations ranged from P4 512ram to 1 Gig.
Yet, it will slow our machines to crawl after a while. I will not say
that it is Netbeans that is casuing the memory leak, perhaps its that
our laptop are not meant to run Pointbase -appserver - netbean
together. However, if I can run Dreamweaver,VS2003, MS-SQL, IIS ,
MySQL, Flash concurrently (which I always do) for other development
works, why do the former combi failed to perform as well?
Today is the 3rd day of coding phase and nothing is done yet because
each deployment takes a 5 mins. Imagine change 1 line of code and wait
for 5 mins. No more F5 (Vs) or F12 (Dreamweaver) to see the immediate
result. We agreed among ourself that with 6 person, if we have used
.NET instead of J2EE, we would have already finished few of the smaller
modules. So much for Write Once Run Anywhere..I just want my Datagrid.