This week in class we started taking a look at AOP, Aspect Oriented Programming. I don’t know too much about it yet, but it deals with “cross-cutting concerns” and its use seems to make sense in some cases especially logging. AspectJ is a popular extension to Java.
Anyways, let’s look at adding AspectJ support to Eclipse. I assume you already have Eclipse installed.
First, open Eclipse and open the Software Updates window from the Help menu.
Now click the Available Software tab and click Add Site. Paste in the following URL:
http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/34/update
Click OK.
Now that the plugin site has been added you will see it listed as AJDT Update Site in the plugin listings. Expand that node to see the available addins. You can grab all of them, but I choose not to get the source code for the plugins. After selecting what you want, click Install.
Follow the installation dialog. Note, you will need to agree to a license agreement.
You will need to restart Eclipse for the install to take affect.
Now that have AspjectJ support in Eclipse you can write the obligatory HelloWorld applicatiion which I will walkthrough in my next post.
The SOLID Principles, popularized by Robert C. Martin, were a topic of discussion in one of my classes this year. So far that class has largely followed on design patterns so Martin’s SOLID principles fit in well.
Via Uncle Bob’s twitter account, I read about reordering the principles in their order of significance. So, perhaps instead of the SOLLD principles, we should call them the SDOLI principles.
Overall, I’ve found these principles to be informative and definitely worth keeping in mind as one designs and implements a piece of software.
In a recent blog post, Jake Dahn noted that he was looking for a local development team and went into a few specifics of his ideal team.
It’s an idea that has been on my mind as well. I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure to work with a few ambitious and driven developers that are also looking to do some fun software development outside of school and work. Just like me.
So, we’ve decided to get together over the weekend (hopefully) and hack on some cool projects. We have some pretty good ideas, so I’m hoping we gain some momentum and get hacking.
No name for the group or anything yet. If/when we get a product that goes live, you can be sure I’ll mention it.
So my second-to-last semester of school has now been done for a few weeks. And I’m definitely looking forward to graduation. I took a course called Software Engineering this semester and the majority of the course is a team project to create a Mahjong game.
I worked together with two friends on the project and it ended up pretty good. We originally were going to write the game in Java because it’s the language we all know the best. But, we couldn’t figure out GUI programming in Java quickly and easily (within 2-3 hours), so we looked at C# and .NET. Using C#, we got a quick GUI up and running with a panel (or tile) on top of another one (that was the hard part in Java) in about 30 minutes or so. So, we ran with that quick demo application and created our Mahjon game.
My wife, Tanya, likes to play the game and so do several of our friends. We used Google Code as our source code repository because I didn’t want to go host it on my desktop (which would force me to leave the machine on 24/7). The code is still on the Google Code project site, under some open-source license, and there’s also a zip file that contains everything necessary to run the game. Just run the executable. No malware, I swear.
Enjoy.