don't fear the NetBeans

as progress reports go, this is a short one: i'm doin' OK, i think. because i'm usually sedated before i go to sleep, i've managed to temporarily wrangle it so that i'm awake when there's more people in the lab, meaning that yesterday someone was kind enough to pick me up when i passed out. 's good to see some people giving a crap; i'd like to think i'd do the same thing in their shoes.

so today i bring you some of the quirks of my newly-adopted Java IDE. in the course of my formal programming education, which isn't anything more than larval-stage, so far i and my impressively inexperienced compatriots have been taught Java (the Lego bricks of programming) using BlueJ, a limited teaching IDE that fits into that analogy as the brightly-painted table with all those cool slots for your Legos. functional, yes; easy-to-use, yes; advanced, hell no.

we'll move on, of course, to NB in time, which is why i'm screwing around with it now just to get a decent working knowledge. luckily for me, it's highly advanced, professional and one helluva complex programming tool. seriously, this baby can do anything. and with Java of all things... i think i'm gonna have to stop denigrating this language; my previous impressions of it were pretty much based on the limited work i'd been able to do with a text editor (believe me, it's fucking hard trying to code a proper GUI with just emacs.)

so this is what i've learned so far:

1. directory path starting with server designation = NB DOES NOT WANT. bad things happen if you try //serv paths anywhere in NB. this i know.

2. in the GUI builder (which i really, really wish i'd had access to three years earlier) some shit doesn't pop up the right size, making windows look like little retarded boxes'o'nothin; just resize, the properties are there... =]

3. it's difficult to make things be the same size in the builder sometimes. sometimes you're meant to use Same Size, others Default Size, and i still haven't figured out which is which.

4. the syntax for the main class name when creating new projects is actually packagename.MainClassName, which took me a stupidly long time to figure out. it would help if it was in the damn docs.

and that's all. end shameless plug.

Lepht