Really, it does. It usually goes one of two ways. Scenario One: You are starting a new project and all the perfect little tools and programs you’ve been using get tossed out the window for a new dev kit or a new compiler. Everything that you’ve had set up for months is just tossed out because the new project you are doing doesn’t use a single thing from you’re last project. Scenario Two: (The one I just had to go through.) You join a project that has been going on for a while, they tell you how they set up their environments, but its never quiet the same. Stuff gets updated, freeware they used gets removed, maybe a component or two now conflict as they have different versions, and one of them, the one that is vital to the project hasn’t been updated in months and all current downloads are busted.
Sounds like a blast, right? So you improvise, trying to get substitutes working, but the thing is most of the team has everything set up just right, and having them try to help you troubleshoot just a slightly different program than the one they had never goes anywhere. But you mange to get to the right setup eventually, or one that’ll do. So here is what I did: Cloned a project from OpenMRS, a very large opensource program my CS class is working on. Easy enough, github is a rather well polished program that is easy and simple to use. Once I got the massive collection of files onto my computer I started to get a JDK setup for it. The initial suggestion was IntelliJ. That sure as hell didnt work. After a couple of days fiddling with it, most of the class gave up on it and moved back to the tried and true eclipse program. Its solid enough and everyone is very comfortable with it, so it was a good choice. Next on list of programs I need for this project was Maven. Cool, Ive used it before, had it setup perfectly a few years back. Since then Ive had a few wipes on my laptop, so I had to get it working again. Of course, the second time wasnt as easy, in the end I figured out I had misspelled one of my environment paths for it, such a silly mistake cost me hours of confusion and annoyance. Then end was in sight! All i needed to do was get the command mvn jetty:run to work and the battle was over. And mvn failed to launch. guess who also didnt have MySQL installed. Also did have that at one point, but hey my computer likes to fail every so often once I mess with settings and things that shouldn’t be messed with. At least SQL was painless to install. Tried that magic command again, and this time it was a success! The battle with setting up my environment was over, I have conquered the mighty beast and got everything running correctly. At least until my next project in 6 or 7 months…
From the blog CS@Worcester – dkayak by Code Complications and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
