Enhancing GWT Enterprise project development productivity

Survey Finds That Java Coding Productivity Remains Poor

Coding productivity among Java developers is still pretty dismal – that’s the key finding of the Java EE Productivity Report 2011 recently released.

by Herman Mehling 

http://www.devx.com/DevX/Article/46988


Yes, Java productivity in general is low in the industry. But I think it is not because of Java or the tools but it is either because not using the Java tools effectively or because not writing proper object oriented code/design patterns. Let us address each of the two points below.


Regarding using Java tools effectively, many-a-times, because we involve so much in the business/technology part of the application, we forget to explore even the basic preferences in Eclipse. The preferences section in Eclipse has lot of options that can help us improve productivity. One such preference setting is "Publish settings" for the server. We use GWT heavily in our applications and GWT clearly separates client side and server side code. To reduce redeployment wait time, we can set 'Never Publish Automatically' in Server pubilsh settings when we know we are only making client side code changes. Remember, client side code changes, does not have to be published to server because while development, only GWT client side code in Eclipse gets executed. This setting would help us not to wait for redeploy after we make client side code changes. And also, for server side code changes, we can choose to publish manually after we finish all changes rather allowing it to automatically redeploy for every server side code change. On top of this, if we can use JBoss 7.0/Tomcat, the redeployment-wait-time gets further reduced.


Regarding writing proper object oriented code and using proper design patters, this can help the organizations to maintain their code effectively. Remember these standards in general. A class should not contain more 1-1.5 pages. Some of the classes that we have written contains 10-12 pages that has to be scrolled down/up for ever in order to enhance/fix bugs. This kills productivity and it causes nightmare to the developers trying to enhance/fix the code. And, use basic proper object oriented design to design first before starting to write code. We don't have to use those UML tools if that takes time but a simple paper and pencil would be enough. A good design only takes 15-20 minutes to sketch out but that 15-20 minutes can be the difference between an easy readable/maintainable code and a code that causes nightmares to maintain.  For example, a complex GWT UI screen, can be separated into multiple classes based on the how the components are laid out as sections in the UI. Each section of the UI can be a class and objects can be created out of these classes and can be assembled in the main UI page. This is a very simple "divide and rule" concept which most of us don't put to use. On top of it, if we can employ Model -view-Presentation (MVP) design pattern, it can further make the code readable and reusable.


With this, I end this writing and I sincerely wish all of you change your coding habits to start writing better code with design and make your's and other's life easy.


A. Rafiq Ahamed
Founder, CEO and Systems Architect,
www.eitworks.com