NetBean, even more fun

I am not going to raise another holly war between netbeans and the eclipese IDE. But, even though eclipse ide worked great after little tweaking, i think everything work better after they are tweaked, I love netbeans for its simple and fast interface. I know, many of you already frowned as called netbeans fast ! Yes indedd. At least for C/C++ development. Netbeans appeared simply lightening fast. It easily replaced geany as my favorite IDE.

It is true, eclipse user base is very rich and so is its plug-in base. Almost all the necessary tools along with huge unnecessary ones (for a particular development view) can be found with eclipse. Especially the subversion plug-in... it is simply splendid). No worries.. I will download the svn module for netbeans. Hope it will not dishearten me :)

Lastly, I also admit, netbeans is very slow for java development. Last time I was developing a non-day-job project using jsp/struts. I choose netbeans and found that it takes all the memory of my computer. Again after tweaking for memory, it came up with much faster speed, even though an honest comment will be . SLOW.

But, if for C++ development, its simply great. Additionally, you can easily create UML design graphically by drag and drop; and then use it in your project ! One interesting feature of the UML module is that, here some of the design pattern templates are built in i.e. just select a pattern, give custom name click ok... you got the classes.

Finally, I am very happy with the new netbean.. I simply love it.

Using Eclipse is Fun !

My current project is about building an embedded software using C++ on a ARM board. Due to some reasons we had to use use Eclipse as we are to use a proprietary tool chain plug-in of the editor. Anyhow, eclipse was too slow to proceed development work fast where deadline is always yelling at the ear and release are very frequent. I started use geany, my favorite editor, for writing codes and just used Eclipse to build the project.

Tonight, I got some relax time(you know 36 degree centigrade is cooler than 40 degree centigrade ! ) and played with eclipse settings. I just stopped the indexer and some other auto completion options -- the result was out of expectation ! Eclipse became fast enough to code on :) Besides, for source code I like courier font, so I did not miss to change that too.

Now, if you are interested, go to Window->Preferences->C/C++ and set off the content assistant and indexer. Bingo... now you have a faster Eclipse.

C++ Member initialization

Many of us may not know that member variables of a class object is initialized before the body of the constructor is executed! The class type members are initialized with the default constructor i.e. constructor with no arguments. Primitive type member variable like int, float etc does not have any constructors, so they are just initialized with an undefined initial value which is often a garbage.

Anyhow, this behavior can be changed ! While defining the constructor to initialize the member variables with desired values put a colon after the constructor's last first-bracket and initialize the member variable placing a pair of first bracket after each member name; don't forget to put the value in between the first brackets. Both the class and primitive type members can be initialized in this way. Here is an example:

class A{
string m_name;
int m_id;

public:
A(int id);
A(int id, string& name);
};
/////
A::A(int id):m_id(id),m_name("No name")
{}

This is a faster way than initializing the member variables in the constructor with assignment operator. Because for the later case member variables are first initialized with their respective default garbage values than assigned with the desired values; whereas in later case they are simply initialized with the desired values !
:)