Caffeine Induced

Flying back from Montreal right now and its become painfully apparent to me that my laptop (alone) is inadequate as a development machine on my current project. The sad part is, this was a state of the art laptop a little over a year ago. Its a Dell Latitude C810 with a PIII-1.13 Ghz Processor and 512MB of RAM.

Why Dell decided to cap the C810's at 512MB of RAM I will never understand. I would gladly shell out the required funds to buy a gig of RAM if the damn thing would take it.

The things I need running to do development on my current project.

• IDEA
• JBOSS/Jetty
• Oracle 9i
• Javac (when building/executing tests)

The laptop works fine as a development platform if I can augment it with another machine. For example, at our Dallas office (and at home), I always have spare desktop machine. I map the network drives on the spare machine, keep a remote window up on it, and run JBoss/Jetty & Oracle on the desktop. This frees all the resources on the laptop for the IDE and the compile/test cycle and works MUCH better. In the grand scheme of universal truths, one could conclude that :

   RAM = GOOD

Oh well, at least my lack of RAM predicament gives me plenty of time to write blogs in notepad while I'm waiting around for a test to complete...

Speaking of - I really like the XP Remote Desktop Connection facility (its built on top of Terminal Server). Its much more like setting your display in X-Windows than Microsoft's previous support (e.g. NetMeeting). One of the things I really love about my laptop is the crisp 1600x1200 display. With Remote Desktop Connection I can login to a server with a crappy video card and still run at 1600x1200 (way cool). I know you could do this a decade or more ago on Unix, but hey - at least MS is improving :)

We have a fairly sizeable project, about 3000 classes in 60 different source directories (each subystem is split into persistence, domain and services layers, each layer has its own source directory). Performance of IDEA has gotten pretty bad of late. Even with 250MB minimum JVM heap size, it frequently goes though big periods (30 seconds or so) where it will not respond. This is running on a PIII 1.13 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM.

I posted this to their bug tracking forum and got some helpful responses. Looks like you can add the following option to the IDEA/bin/idea.lax file to help with this problem (turns on concurrent GC) :

	lax.nl.java.option.additional=-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC 

The full thread is here if anyone's interested :

        http://www.intellij.net/tracker/idea/viewSCR?publicId=9910

Been having to write a bit of JavaScript lately... Sure do wish I had a development environment that did for JavaScript what IDEA does for Java. Seems like this would be pretty easy for IDEA to add support for this. Sure would be nice...

Speaking of handy tools for web development, checkout Mozilla's built-in DOM Inspector. It basically has three panes. One shows a real, rendered web page, one shows the DOM tree for that web page, and another shows all DOM attributes of the currently selected node in the DOM Tree.

As you select different nodes in the DOM tree, the corresponding visual portion of the web page flashes. This is really great for analyzing some of the more sophisticated web sites out there.