Ideal development platform for GWT/GAE?

[Mark Molloy]

Hi, I currently have one laptop (Windows 7 64-bit) that I use for
everything -- and that's a lot of #&^%. It is an operational mess.
Now, I've installed MyEclipse 9.0 to develop a GWT/GAE application.
Unfortunately, whenever Eclipse is running, the browsers start timing
out. E.g., it is impossible to use gmail. :( Performance of Eclipse
is pretty erratic, too.

I'm thinking that I should get a machine dedicated to development/
testing of my GWT/GAE application. I just want to install Java,
Eclipse, and the plugins I need for the app.

What do people in this group recommend? I want a minimum of
operational maintenance, reasonable performance, and consistent "it
just works" behavior, in place of the constant hanging, re-installing,
head-scratching operational frustration I currently experience. I'd
like to be able to spend my productive time coding and testing
algorithms, not trying to figure out why the layers of software
underneath don't work.

Thanks in advance for your help!

-Mark

[Robert Lockwood]

Hi, Mark.  I use a mac Air but a larger or second display would be better.  I use an old macMini as a server for testing.  I'm a rank amateur here though.  My code will run on LINUX on a small intranet when finished.

I missed Pete and the boys, and the rest of the family as I'm in Brazil on vacation.  Hope you're well.

Nate

-Mark

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[Mark Molloy]

Thanks! Boy, I thought I would get more opinions on this! Aren't
there any ex-Windows users out there who have something to say about
the development platform to which they moved?

On Nov 28, 4:35 am, Robert Lockwood <rnlockw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Mark.  I use a mac Air but a larger or second display would be better.
>  I use an old macMini as a server for testing.  I'm a rank amateur here
> though.  My code will run on LINUX on a small intranet when finished.
>
> I missed Pete and the boys, and the rest of the family as I'm in Brazil on
> vacation.  Hope you're well.
>
> Nate
>

[Salvador Diaz]

Hi,

I was on windows when I started developing with GWT (that was when GWT was at version 1.3, so I was on XP) It was a nightmare, everything was horribly slow.

I then switched to linux and haven't looked back ever since. Currently my setup is based on ubuntu 11.04 on gnome 2 (I haven't upgraded to 11.10 because of unity and gnome 3 but YMMV)

And of course, having a core i7 setup with an ssd and 8GB of ram really helps to speed things up.

Hope that helps

[Jeffrey Chimene]

On 11/28/2011 6:08 AM, Mark Molloy wrote:
> Thanks! Boy, I thought I would get more opinions on this! Aren't
> there any ex-Windows users out there who have something to say about
> the development platform to which they moved?

Ha!
Consider this charming trochee I composed in 1999:
"Windows free by Two Thousand Three"

Thanks to Debian for the inspiration.

[Thomas Broyer]

Same here, without the SSD ;-)

I switched to Ubuntu from Win XP back in May, upgraded to 11.10 (and Gnome 3) since then, when I received my new laptop. I don't regret the switch either (I used to run Debian Linux at home years ago, before I met my wife, so it wasn't all new for me). I've kept Windows in dual-boot, just in case I'd had some .NET dev to do in the future (with a 750GB HDD, keeping a 80GB partition for Windows is no big deal)

My previous laptop was a Latitude E5400 (Core2 Duo 7250 w/ 4GB RAM) and it worked great already (I didn't ask for the new one). Of course, the new laptop (Latitude E6520, i7 w/ 8GB RAM) runs much more smoothly!

[David Vree]

+1 for Ubuntu. I run both 10.04 and 11.10 and both can be made to
work great. Personally I like to download Eclipse and install to /opt
rather than use the normal package manager, but that's just me.

I really don't use Windows anymore except to run MS Office and some
Adobe stuff. For that I use a virtual machine app on Ubuntu called
VirtualBox...its free and runs Windows faster than when natively
installed on my machine!

The command line on Linux is better than Windows and I find things are
generally faster and more stable. My Ubuntu desktop machine hasn't
been rebooted in 10 months...

[Pavel Byles]

MacBook Pro + SSD + 8GB Ram.

GWT Dev on this is great.

Also have an Ubuntu Linux VM that I have some other GWT tester projs that I just haven't moved over as yet.

-Mark

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Pav

[Konstantin Zolotarev]

I'm using Ubuntu Linux 11.04 and 2 monitors.

Core 2 Duo (3.0 Hhz), 8 GB RAM - works great 

[Y2i]

It seems that Ubuntu Linux exhibits "just works" behavior the best because all necessary tools (git, java, maven) are very easy to install/upgrade from centralized repository (no need to jump through various sites to get them).  I use un-modified Ubuntu 11.10 installation with Unity and personally found it very productive compared to other UIs (Win7, OS X, Gnome 3).

[Thomas Broyer]

On Tuesday, November 29, 2011 8:38:01 AM UTC+1, Y2i wrote:

It seems that Ubuntu Linux exhibits "just works" behavior the best because all necessary tools (git, java, maven) are very easy to install/upgrade from centralized repository (no need to jump through various sites to get them).

Er, well, Oracle Java is no longer distributed that way (another Oracle bad decision re. Java), only OpenJDK (and we've had a few issues with OpenJDK).

Maven in Ubuntu repositories is still Maven 2; Maven 3 has to be installed manually or through a PPA.

Eclipse 3.7 is available but I prefer installing it by hand and manage plugins and updates through Eclipse's own system.

And I'd actually prefer an auto-update on Google Chrome, as they do on Windows, than a PPA (and similarly for Firefox).

 

I use un-modified Ubuntu 11.10 installation with Unity and personally found it very productive compared to other UIs (Win7, OS X, Gnome 3).

It's a matter of taste I'm afraid: I much prefer the window focus management in Mutter (Gnome 3) or even Windows, than the one in Compiz (Unity), and if you're using Subversion, there's nothing better than TortoiseSVN. On the other hand, there's actually nothing better than git-svn for working with subversion repositories, and the git-gui/gitk combo works great whichever platform; it just happens to be much easier to install and update on Linux than on Windows (on MacOSX I'm told there are really good alternative Git frontends: GitX et al; but I never used MacOSX so I can't compare).

But really, the thing is not much the OS but the hardware. Of course the OS is important as an OS that drains too much will limit the resources available for actual work (and Windows is in the "bad guys" family), but not as important as the amount of RAM and computing power, and the speed of your disks (that's why we chose really big HDDs, for increased speed relative to smaller ones, with a cost much lower than an SSD and hopefully a longer lifetime).

[Jens]

We recently bought some Mac minis (base 2,3Ghz Dual Core i5 model but with 750GB HDD and 8 GB Ram) and we are pretty happy with them. They have a good performance and are silent during normal Eclipse coding/deploying work. When building an app using Ant we copy our source to a ramdisk so we can do everything else (compiling, jpa weaving, build jars / wars) in memory which saves time and the HDD isn't a real constraint anymore. You could also add a really small SSD (possibly the smalles you can get) to your system that only stores your Eclipse workbench to speed things up further.

For Git we use SourceTree from Atlassian (www.sourcetreeapp.com) which is really a great Git client for OS X. But we also have the choice to switch to console for git or for simple things just use EGit from Eclipse.

In my opinion OS X is a really good OS for development. Its productive, easy to use and you always have the choice to use its UNIX core. If you don't like OS X or Apple in general I would recommend using Ubuntu or Linux Mint (also based on Ubuntu).

-- J.

[Tomi B.]

Hey Mark,

From anecdotal evidence Ubuntu has been the fastest with our code base. We've got developers on Windows 7, OSX, and some on Ubuntu. There has been a striking difference in compile times on the Ubuntu machines on comparable hardware (much faster). Personally, I'm on Win 7 64-bit. On the same hardware, moving from 32-bit to 64-bit dropped compile times to almost half.

//Tomi B.

[Ashton Thomas]

I moved from Ubuntu to MacBook to a very recent MacBookPro. A good processor and a bit of memory for dev mode really helps. My new machine is a beast which makes me smile to run in dev and compile my GWT app. 2.5i7quad/SSD/8gbMem. Dev mode screams on this thing. And it compiles the app for production like it is opening Chrome. It bankrupted me but I don't regret it since I am working on a pretty big project which was painfully slow on my previous machine. At times: Eclipse uses 1.2+ gb memory and Java and Firefox take almost another gb. (what's the point in having it if you don'e use it..)