My favorite Free/Open Source Intellij Community plugins

Suggestions for other/better Free/Open Source plugins for current Intellij CE are welcome:

• Maven Helper
• Git .ignore support
• Bash Support
• PlantUML integration
• String Manipulation
• YAML/Ansible support
• AsciiDoc support
• BrowseWordAtCaret
• Grep Console

Continuous delivery using github, travis-ci and bintray

Let’s say you work on a Java application and want to frequently make it available for download so that user’s can easily try the latest version.

Let’s say you work primarily on your laptop or personal computer using a Java IDE and commit code changes, but you don’t want to spend time manually building jars, packaging war or zip files, testing your application or uploading files to a website, etc.

Instead you want to have a fully automated process that compiles your source code, runs automated tests and other quality control mechanisms, builds your application and uploads the result to a public website.

But you don’t want to install any infrastructure for this and not run anything besides Java and your IDE on your own machine(s).

Basically you want to use developer-friendly reliable cloud services but you don’t want to pay a single cent.

All of this is possible, as long your code is Open Source:

• Host your source code on github
• Let travis-ci run vour build process
• Let travis-ci upload the build result to bintray

For details, you can take a look at one of my github projects.

Relevant config files:

• .travis.yml
• .travis/artifact-upload.sh

JBoss Undertow is pulling me in … :o)

I am very impressed as I am trying out the various code examples for Undertow, a kick-ass, light-weight yet powerful, ultra-easy-to-embed HTTP and Java Servlet engine.

One of my side projects requires an embeddable yet feature-complete Java HTTP engine with low memory footprint and a simple straightforward API. I dismissed Tomcat, briefly considered Jetty, found Winstone too old and unmaintained, simpleframework not well-enough documented, vert.x and netty a little too much for my purposes and/or too complicated, so that a few weeks ago I had actually started to clone and refactor NanoHttpd.

The NanoHttpd refactoring was a great learning experience, but it certainly felt like I was reinventing the wheel in the form of a cute and mobile but slightly rusty foldable unicycle. ;o) – no offense please, nanohttpd developers …

Then I found out about Undertow. The author Stuart Douglas is now officially my hero. What an awesome job he is doing! The server meets all of the above mentioned requirements and is apparently also comparatively fast. No wonder it is the HTTP engine used by Wildfly, the new JBoss AS.

Anyway, if you want to try yourself, I’d go with version 1.1 final at this time, i.e. this in your Maven pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.undertow</groupId>
    <artifactId>undertow-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.0.Final</version>
</dependency>

I decided to pretty much ignore the documentation section of the undertow.io website for now, as it is still for version 1.0 and the API has changed – improved, I guess – since then. It seems to me, that at this point the core code itself and the usage examples are the best documentation for version 1.1. Both are Maven modules of the undertow github project.

By the way, if you are wondering why the project has no issues section on github: The issue tracking is done in the JBoss Jira.

Java software engineering – reference resources

Official Java and JEE

Java Technology Reference

Java Standard Edition (JSE)

Java Enterprise Edition (JEE)

The official Java tutorials

The official JEE 7 tutorial

JEE 7 Technologies index

Java language spec and JVM spec

Java community

Oracle Java community

OpenJDK

Java Community Process (JCP)

Apache Commons

Apache.org Java projects

JBoss.org

Spring

Google Guava

Trending Java projects on github

JEE and Java web servers

Apache Tomcat

JBoss Wildfly

Glassfish

Build and test automation

Sonatype Maven books

Jenkins documentation (wiki)

JUnit reference documentation

Source and version control

The SVN reference book

Git reference documentation

Java IDEs

Intellij IDEA documentation

Eclipse documentation

Netbeans knowledge base

Vim configuration for Java coding

Create single copyright holder, GPL licensed source code repository

I sometimes want to create a source code repository and build process for a GPL licensed software project, where the sole copyright holder (“owner”) is a single legal entity, like a company or a foundation.

This is how I do it:

• Link to the license from README.md (e.g. the Free Software Foundation’s GPL, version 2)
• At top of each source file: Copyright notice, license statement, warranty disclaimer
• Include a plain-text copy of the full license in the root of your distributable package(s)
• In the README.md, indicate that the project mandates copyright assignment
• Define the legal agreement process between code contributors and the project owner

The GPL was chosen for its strong copyleft nature and combined with the sole copyright holder approach to enable dual licensing business models.

On sites like github, the code contribution itself is usually done by pull request. The legal agreement process between code contributor and project owner should be complete before the pull request is accepted.

I am not yet sure how to best automate updating the year range in the copyright notice, probably at commit time.

Subversion 1.8 released

The new Subversion 1.8 features look quite good for a centralized Version Control System (VCS).

But note that the Subversion 1.8 working copy format is backwards-incompatible. Some tools like recent TortoiseSVN versions will use the 1.8 format by default which will cause compatibility problems for IntelliJ and any other tools that do not yet support it.

So for now, it is probably better to stick with 1.7 and wait until all your tools fully support 1.8. For IntelliJ you might want to watch [IDEA-94942] for status updates.

Personally, I am more interested in Git anyway because it offers all the flexibility of a decentralized VCS. I am reading the free “Pro Git” ebook on my Kobo eReader (epub format).

Sharing repos via Git daemon on Windows

I started using Git on Windows, exposing my repositories to team members via git daemon.

I followed this very useful tutorial.

Version Control for corporate development: Git

What is Git?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)
http://git-scm.com/downloads
http://git-scm.com/download/win

Reference documentation
http://git-scm.com/docs

About Git, compared to alternatives
http://git-scm.com/about

A very useful post on stackoverflow:
Typical problems using Git in corporate environment with solutions

Linus Torvalds’ famous “rant” style presentation about Git vs Subversion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

Questions, discussions and answers on stackoverflow.com:
Distributed Version Control Systems and the Enterprise – a Good mix?
Can we finally move to Distributed VCS in Corporate Software?
Git-Based Source Control in the Enterprise
Reasons against using “Git” in the enterprise

Article: “Benefits of Git for business” (from 2008 but still valid):
http://pathfindersoftware.com/2008/08/selling-git-on-the-business-end/

Presentation: “Git for Companies” (Video and Slides, from 2012):
http://2012.con-fess.com/sessions/-/details/169/GIT-for-Companies

Pre-tested commits with git and Jenkins:
http://blog.cloudbees.com/2012/03/dont-phunk-with-my-stable-branch.html

IDE support
http://www.eclipse.org/egit/
http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/ide/git.html
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/using-git-integration.html

Commercial Git Hosting (for no-hassle repo infrastructure)
https://github.com/plans
https://bitbucket.org/plans