Currently I’m learning Hybris, which is a “Multichannel e-Commerce Suite” – in other words: webshop. Okay, that’s only the half of the truth, but because this post is not about Hybris but about tools, it is okay to assume it is a simple webshop. Of course for the end-customers it is usually a webshop. You don’t need to care what it is in detail. For some reasons the company will not give you a trial version to play with it 🙁 Because of the fact, that they are not using stuff from the bleeding edge, my tool decisions are reasonable for many projects

Before I start to describe my tools, let me describe Hybris from the developer perspective with a few words. Hybris is based on Java and Spring, and runs on an Apache Tomcat. A lot of XML files are used to generate Java files. Ant is used as a build tool.

Operating System: Linux

I tried very hard to use Windows, but it is really unusable! For many reasons. I can not say how wired and strange this OS is. It is a pity to use it if you have to do a bit more than writing emails and office documents. I also tried a Mac, but there is no advantage over Linux. Of course the Desktop is much more beautiful, than XFCE on Linux, but the keyboard layout is really strange. An other problem with the Mac are security issues because of the update policy of Apple. In the end Linux wins 🙂

The tools which are used for Java developing are developed under a Unix system. For that they feel very unnatural on Windows. A Mac seems to me a reasonable decision if you want some eye candy and it is okay to have some shortcomings in the usability.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Eclipse

Yes, I know, there is IntelliJ and it has some big advantages over Eclipse, but Eclipse is free, used from many people, it is easy to write plugins and there are many plugins to adapt.

Let me say a few words about open source and why it is so great. At first you can try it at home without any limitations. You can change it to learn more about the software. You can take a look at the source and learn. You can be sure, that you can use this software in many years. And (the biggest advantage for me) you don’t need to handle all the licenses.

Back to Eclipse. Today Feb 2013 Eclipse 4.2 is out, but it is so incredible slow, that I’ve changed to the alpha version 4.3. It is much faster and not as unstable as you think. And it is much more stable than XCode on the Mac.

Version Control System: Subversion

Of course, Git is out there and sometimes I use it. It is not that I prefer Subversion over Git in general, but Subversion fits into our needs and it is used in the whole company. Subversion is good, reliable, stable, and widely used. No need to change it.

Collaboration Tools: Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)

A lot of people like Jira (Ticket Management) and the Confluence (Wiki), but I would choose GitHub. GitHub is much more simple and let you focus on you work. The Atlassian tools may be okay for the business guys, but for a poor developer they are not straight forward and so they break the work flow. I like simple tools that are helping to organize work, but they should not break your flow.

Part One

This was part one of this article. I will write updates and maybe a second part later. Maybe I will change my mind about some tools I use 😉