devgrind

As I am frequently working with Eclipse, I often stumble upon wizards - small dialog windows, which promise to ease my daily developer’s grind (pun intended). Let me state one thing - I loathe wizards.

For example, I had a Java class which I wanted to create a web service from. No problem, I thought, the Web Standard Tools in Eclipse have a wizard for that. Next time, I will do it by hand, because of several problems:

• That specific wizard crashed in about two of three times I ran it
• When it ran through, the wizard left me with a feeling that I had not learned anything about the process of creating a web service from a Java class. The only things I learned is to use some voodoo and guessing for which values I had to fill in the wizard’s forms.
• The wizard did not tell me in advance which generated source code it would overwrite. So at first run, some of my troublesome hand-coded classes were overwritten. Thank God for version control.

As a conclusion, I tend to use wizards only when I …

1. … am sure that the wizard solves a problem faster than (and in the same way as) I could write the code by hand.
2. … have a rough idea of what the wizard is doing under the hood.

Filed by Magnus at 11:27 am under development, eclipse, java, tools
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