Setting up

I used some time today to set up a nice development environment in my home machine (which runs WinXP). I already had Cygwin installed, and it comes with every conceivable Unix tool nicely packaged so that you can pretend you have a Unix box even while using Windows (in fact, I can’t remember when was the last time I used the regular Command window; now I use bash instead). Today I set up a CVS repository for my source code and made sure the environment is properly set so I can use it properly.

Then I downloaded ant, the building tool of choice for Java, and installed it. Remarkably easy, now all I have to do is learn to use it properly. Yes, I’ve been building my projects manually so far.

Lastly, I downloaded JBuilder 9, a free (for personal use) tool from Borland that provides a nice environment for developing applications, applets and everything else. It is a huge download, over 65MB, and installation takes quite a while; looks better than “vi” and “ant” on a bash window, and I do hope it is worth using; can’t really comment much on it so far.

I’ll keep you posted on further developments. By the way, the next thing I need to do is to set up a backup tool…