Month: June 2011

I hate getters and setters

I hate getters and setters in java. Half of my code is filled with them. They are pointless boilerplate code that says nearly nothing. 99.9% (I made that number up, but it sounds reasonable) percent of the cases they don't have any additional code in them.

And it is really hard to see whether a variable is read-only/read-write/write-only. You have to find the getters/setters to see that.

I have a notation where I put all the modifiers at the end of the class and separate them with a page of whitespace.

I don't like the C# solution - it's not really shorter, only binds the getter and setter together.

I have a proposition: use annotations:

    @Getter @Setter
    private boolean subscribedForEmailNotification;

And one wants to write extra code, one should be able to use the old notation. The compiler will check for collisions.

I don't see any reason why this cannot become the next syntactic sugar in java where one saves a bunch of useless code-writing.

Rename Mac OS X applications

Suppose you would like to have firefox 3, 4 and now 5 simultaneously. Unfortunately renaming applications is not possible via Finder.

Suppose you have firefox3 installed. Do the following:

$ cd /Applications
$ mv Firefox.app "Firefox 3.app"

Then install firefox4 and do that

$ mv Firefox.app "Firefox 4.app"

Install firefox5 and then:

$ mv Firefox.app "Firefox 5.app"

Now you would have all three versions:

$ ls -a | grep Firefox
Firefox 3.app
Firefox 4.app
Firefox 5.app
$

The even show up correctly in Applications tab:

(I messed up in renaming and Firefox 4 is actually Firefox4)

Note: unfortunately you cannot launch them simultaneously since Firefox has a mechanism to check if it is already running.

IntelliJ IDEA 10.5 on Mac OS X: save subversion credentials

This is a note-to-self. So when I forget the solution I can come back here and find it.

IntelliJ IDEA is one of the best Java IDEs. More here.

I have had the problem of not being able to save the password of a test svn repository. I found the solution:

  1. vi ~/.subversion_IDEA/servers
  2. add the following lines:
    store-passwords = yes
    store-plaintext-passwords = yes
  3. Save and restart Idea.
  4. Play around with the changes tab until a popup shows up that asks for credentials.
  5. Give the credentials and click <Save the credentials> or whatever it says.
  6. That's it.

 

Distributed version control systems (Lecture)

This is a presentation I just gave on Bulgarian Java User Group (BGJUG). The topic is Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). The main DVCSs mentioned are Mercurial and Git.

Here it is:

Distributed Version Control Systems 

Btw, consider it absolutely free. But if you mention my name I'd be grateful.