Most Java coders I meet are IDE guys who are totally lost when it
comes to doing anything outside of the IDE. I'm not necessarily
talking about the dumb ones here. I regularly meet extremely bright
developers who just haven't been exposed to the command line and don't
realize how easy it is to solve problems by stringing together a
few simple commands.
One of the questions I've heard often at work is which jar has the
FooAdaptor class in it? I regularly need to track down classes, so
I wrote a simple shell script called searchjars:
#!/bin/sh
term=$1
shift
for i in $*
do
echo == $i
jar tvf $i | grep -i $term
done
This can be invoked as searchjar FooAdaptor *.jar.
Normally I wouldn't write a shell script for something so trivial, but
I use it so often that I decided to do it.
Another common problem is tracking down those elusive
NoClassDefErrors. At work we compile our application against struts
1.1 even though a few of the classes get deployed on old vendor
proprietary version of tomcat that can only run struts 1.0. This
hasn't been a problem until today when we started getting
NoClassDefFoundError not being able to find ActionConfig on the struts
1.0 side. This class wasn't directly referenced in any of our classes,
so we needed a way to find out which of the .class files was referencing
it.
I knew that there had to be a reference to ForwardConfig in the
class pool of one of the classes. So, I went to the build directory
and used a combination of strings and find: find . -type f -exec
strings -f {} \; | grep ForwardConfig.
Of course there are many other ways to solve the problem, but my
point is that I think most Java coders have a very unhealthy lack of
understanding of the tools at their disposal. If it's not a menu on
the IDE, then they don't know how to do it. But there's just no
substitute for the power of the command line.
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