My Software Development Environment

I had this idea rattling around in my head that I wanted to give a try at.  It had to do with 3-D modeling, but more of a kinematic application than a static geometry problem.  Java was a hands-down favorite language, and the 3D rendering library gave me the tools I thought would be just what I needed to work with.

The way graphic objects relate to each other is hierarchical – parent-child like – but the software to generate any kind of parameterization was just too messy to want to deal with directly, so I started thinking in terms of how I could code it all into a language.  The more I toyed with the idea, the more an XML structure just seemed to be a good fit: it is hierarchical, easily tailorable, and easy to edit.

I used JBuilder at work so that was an easy choice for an environment to do my development in.  I knew it had a built-in XML package so that was also an easy pick.  I know the Oracle system quite well, and I know they have a freebie home-use version, but I didn’t think a relational database was the right structure for the data I envisioned.

Over time, however, as JBuilder matured, it moved away from a proprietary system and towards a flavor of Eclipse.  I was sad to see that trend because they had a TON of features that just was more elegant and productive than I found in Eclipse, even with all their add-ons.  But alas, that’s where they went.  I guess they just couldn’t continue doing business selling an expensive tool that anyone can just go out and get an “almost-as-good” tool for free.  Oh well, that’s how things go sometimes.

Anyway, as they changed their business model, the internals of their tool suite changed too.  And they axed their proprietary XML library (which I thought was pretty good) in favor of the public library (which I didn’t think was easy to use at all), so since I had quite a lot of experience with reading and writing XML by then, I just decided to throw it all away and write my own.  Although my library is utterly trivial compared to the public library, it serves my needs quite nicely, avoiding the complexity and cumberness of a universal tool.  A Swiss-Army knife with several useful goodies is cool, but after adding dozens and dozens of goodies you can see how it isn’t quite as cool any more.

Anyway, over time, I’ve gone from one version of JBuilder to another until I finally abandoned them all together in favor of NetBeans.  I miss some of the good-old JBuilder features, but they’re gone, and I’m not going to go on living in the past.  And I am compelled to use Eclipse (at work), now, and it has matured so that even the difference between it and NetBeans is bluring.

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