Tuesday 29 March 2011

Book Review: Version Control with Subversion

I just finished reading the online version of the Version Control with Subversion book, which is available for free at the link provided. The book was an incredible help in teaching me the ins and outs of subversion. The only thing I can say that was perhaps not as great as it should have been is that it sometimes went into too much detail, exploring too many of the options and fringe use cases.

While I have managed to set up a repository, make it available over WebDAV and have a Redmine install use it, all without having read this book, this was mostly done by following a recipe. This means that I didn't delve too much into the workings of the software or all of the different configurations that you could have. This area is where this book shines. It tells you how you could have done things differently and the possible reasons for doing so. I personally found several configuration options which I have tweaked on my own Subversion/Apache setup to make it more secure and efficient.

Overall, a good read and while I can't say for sure that everything in this book will be relevant to you, I can say for sure that nearly everyone using Subversion will find something in this book for them.

Monday 21 March 2011

Eclipse IDE indentation shortcut

If you're editing some code in Eclipse and you want to indent it, you just select the block of code and hit the TAB key. But what about if you want go go back the other way? In this case, you just use Shift+TAB.

Simple really, not sure why they don't have the keyboard shortcut listed next to the menu option to do the same thing.

Saturday 5 March 2011

Changing JRE's in Ubuntu

If you're working with Java on Ubuntu, you have two main choices as to which runtime to use. The open source OpenJDK and the official Sun runtime. Luckily, due to the alternatives system in Ubuntu (probably inherited from Debian) you can install both of these and switch between them as you see fit.

To see your currently installed JRE's run the command:

$ update-java-alternatives -l

and you should see some output like:

java-6-openjdk 1061 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk
java-6-sun 63 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun


This assumes that you've installed both of the runtimes. If you've only got one or the other installed, you will only see one line in the above output.

Now that we know which runtimes are installed, it would also be nice to be able to see which one we are using at the moment. Run the command:

$ java -version

If you see the ouput:

java version "1.6.0_20"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9.7) (6b20-1.9.7-0ubuntu1~10.04.1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.0-b09, mixed mode)


Your are running the OpenJDK runtime. If you see:

java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.1-b02, mixed mode)


You are running the Sun runtime. As an aside, the OpenJDK version is generally always a few versions behind the official Sun version.

So now that we know which runtimes we have installed and which one we are using at the moment, we can finally switch between them, using the update-java-alternatives command.

To switch to Sun's JRE:

sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-sun

To switch to OpenJDK:

sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-openjdk

To learn about the OpenJDK project and how it differs from the Sun Java runtime, you can have a look at:

http://openjdk.java.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

The 'update-java-alternatives' command has a lot more options allowing you to choose to switch just the JRE (and keep the JDK the same), or only switch out the browser plugin. To see all of the alternative options, have a look at the man page 'man update-java-alternatives'.