Wednesday, September 14, 2011

What's so difficult, dude?

I have no idea!

How many times have you asked yourself this question? In the last couple of days I asked this question numerous times.
I'm currently working on some enhancements for a gradle plugin to simplify Flex development. This feels so slow and error prone, even if the task is not really complicated and it's not overly complex. But I'm stuck somewhere in the tools.

First: I'm no expert for IntelliJ! Not yet!
Since I used to work the last 10 years with Eclipse and I was very fluent with keyboard shortcuts, everything feels so different and complicated.
What is the shortcut to open all Implementors of this Interface in IntelliJ? I don't know yet. But this gets better from day to day. I found this nifty functionality triggered by Cmd+Shift+A. This will bring up a Popup window where you can search for an action and it shows the keyboard shortcut.

Second: The other unknown to my equation is gradle itself
It's not always obvious how the things are related and wired together. Don't get me wrong: Gradle is a great tool, but developing a plugin for gradle that does a little bit more than 'Hello Build', and finding the right pieces to use, is not always that easy. What makes it more complicated than necessary, is the fact that my dev env setup is probably not optimal to make this tasks easy.
Having two different projects (gradle and GradleFx) and trying to debug something in the latest gradle snapshot, is not really working for me. For that reason I started to write some unit tests, in order to increase my confidence level about my written code. But this only worked to a certain extend. Now I'm stuck in writing some, IMHO, basic unit tests and I can't do the simplest things without digging too deep into the internals of gradle.

Third: Probably it always too late for writing code.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.