How I do development...

My development environment is a multi-machine setup, running Windows XP and Vista, and sometimes Mac OS X as my 'desktop' machines, connecting to a Linux box as a server. I use SecureCRT (a really good terminal program) to connect to the Linux box shell prompt. I use Exceed as an X display server on my Windows boxes (or the X11.app on Mac OS X) when I want to see what JBidwatcher looks like running on Linux.

Actual development is done in JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA. It sounds sappy, but it completely changed how I do Java development. I don't know if I'd have stuck with Java without it. The easy refactoring capabilities have made JBidwatcher 2.0 possible. I use it on my Windows boxes, and my Mac OS X laptop, and keep everything in synch using a subversion server. Fair disclosure, they granted me an Open Source license for use in developing JBidwatcher. It will really hurt, should I ever no longer qualify for it, though, because I'll have to buy myself a copy. It's that kind of tool.

All builds are done from the Linux box, using Apache Ant and Launch4J. The Mac OS X version is created with tar and gzip. The Windows version is stitched together by Launch4J. The Linux version is the .jar file, straight up. Recently, I've started building a Windows Installer, but that requires downloading the Windows executable to a Windows-based box, running an installer generator, and uploading it back up.

Many of my old boxes as described below have gone the way of all such old hardware. Drives freeze, motherboards and CPUs die, and sometimes they just get mothballed in the process of a move. I no longer have a Solaris machine, and neither I nor anyone I know have tried it on FreeBSD in a while. However, I regularly get emails from OS/2 (eComStation) users who note that it still works there. I do have several Mac's, two Windows boxes (XP and Vista), and two Linux boxes (both running Redhat/CentOS).

Old setup as of September 7, 2002... Very out of date in 2008.

My development environment is a dual-machine development environment, running Windows 2000 as a 'desktop' machine (acting mostly as a smart terminal), connecting to a Linux box as a server. I use SecureCRT (a really good terminal program) to connect to the Linux box shell prompt. I use Exceed as an X display server on my Windows machine, and Samba on the Linux box to export my home directory as a network drive. Then when I want to run and test on Linux, it shows up as an X window. When I want to run on Windows, I use the network mapped directory to run the exact same binary, so I don't introduce any changes in making it build.

From the Linux box, I use a shell session to do the rebuilds ('make clean; make jar'), and run the app under Linux. I use XEmacs remote-displaying to the Windows machine to do my actual coding. The compiles are done using 'jikes', a REALLY great Java compiler that is super-fast, and open source from IBM. I have a copy of the IBM JDK for Linux and the Sun JDK for Linux and I use both to make sure it runs cleanly. Under Windows, I use the normal Sun JDK, although I've got 1.3.1 and 1.4 installed, so that when people report bugs I can test it. I really should have the 1.2.2 JRE still, but I didn't reinstall it the last time I upgraded.

I've been developing like this for many years, and so it was a pleasant surprise when I found out that this is nearly identical to the development environment of most of the engineers at my new job.

I also have a Solaris box, and a MacOSX box on my home network that I can copy the .jar file to and test on, before doing anything like making a release. (The MacOSX box is new, I sniped it off eBay using JBidwatcher about a month ago, unfortunately AFTER my 0.8 release. 0.8 isn't very kind to OSX users, and I need to clean that up for my next release. (Ed.Note: I've cleaned it up some, it's still not perfect)) A friend of mine does FreeBSD testing on an occasional basis, but I'm not claiming it'll regularly work on that until I get a box in my place set up running it.

All that is only because I'm doing the releases, for just doing development you don't need all that, but if you really want to make write-once, run- anywhere code, you need to be confident that it's going to live up to that claim. That's why I have all those 'puters.
by: Morgan Schweers