Larg GWT Project and compile time problem - gwt

How do I do for my larg GWT project, the compile time is going large more and more.
If the best way is splitting the module to multiple modules, how can I do this.
RGDS

I don't think that splitting project to modules will help. to the contrary it even can slow compilation. Speed of compiling depends on number of permutations which GWT compiles.
What you can do:
Compile GWT project only for 1 web browser. You can define this explicitly in GWT configuration file. <set-property name="user.agent" value="ie6"/> Other options are ie6, gecko1_8, safari.
Reduce number of used languages (for
development stage). Use only 1 locale.

The GWT compiler is inherently slow. Konoplianko provided some optimizations in his answer, but this will only go so far. There are 2 more compiler options that will help. You can play around with the number of worker threads, usually going from 1 to 2 will help and sometimes 3, but depending on your system it will hurt compile time when you get above a certain point(usually 3 in my experience). Also you can use the -draftCompile option if you are using 2.1. GWT was architected with the intention that you only compile when you intend to deploy something not during development. It was intended that you use hosted mode for development because it can keep track of what has changed and only recompile what is needed instead of having to recompile everything. I am not sure if it would help but changing the output from OBF to DETAILED or vice-versa might effect compile time.

Here is two topic that I think will be helpful to you
How to get GWT to compile multiple modules and How do I speed up the gwt compiler?

Related

JUnit Testing for Eclipse RCP. How to do it?

I would like to write JUnit test for my Eclipse RCP while I continue developing the code. When starting the application the different plugins initialize variables of various plugins/classes (mostly within their start methods) which are needed for the correct functionality.
If this initialization doesn't happen, it is impossible to test code because it depends on those values.
How do I solve this issue without creating a lot of dummy values?
What is the general approach to testing Eclipse RCPs?
You're facing a common problem: Too many dependencies. You need to cut them.
With Eclipse 3, this is going to be somewhat hard. Try to split the code into things that depend on the Eclipse platform running and everything else. Eclipse often uses interfaces, so you can test many things using mocks.
With e4, things got more simple since many services will be injected, making mocking and testing even easier.
But the goal must always be to have as much code as possible that doesn't depend on SWT or the platform. Create your own interfaces if you have to. The runtime imlementations just wrap Eclipse code. For tests, you can use mocks to simulate the Eclipse runtime.
You can run tests using JUnit plugintest, that will start up the plugin framework and will allow for testing of plugins. But this usually only solves some of the issues. The best suggestion is as Aaron suggests to separate functionality as much as possible to the point where all your actual code are just plain old java objects that you can test normally. All dependencies to Eclipse are in different classes and are kept as thin as possible so that they dont require testing.
This can be difficult to achieve, so mocking may be required. Another trick I've resorted to at times is to use Java reflection to change values of private fields, see this question

Develop plugins in Go?

Can go run dynamically in order to be used for a plugin based application ?
In eclipse, we can create some plugins that Eclipse can run dynamically.
Would the same thing be possible in Go ?
I'll argue that those are two separate problems :
having dynamic load
having plugins
The first one is simply no : A Go program is statically linked, which means you can't add code to a running program. And which also means you must compile the program to let it integrate plugins.
Fortunately, you can define a program accepting plugins in Go as in most languages, and Go, with interfaces and fast compilation doesn't make that task hard.
Here are two possible approaches :
Solution 1 : Plugin integrated in the main program
Similarly to Eclipse plugins, we can integrate the "plugins" in the main program memory, by simply recompiling the program. In this sense we can for example say that database drivers are plugins.
This may not feel as simple as in Java, as you must have a recompilation and you must in some point of your code import the "plugin" (see how it's done for database drivers) but, given the standardization of Go regarding directories and imports, it seems easy to handle that with a simple makefile importing the plugin and recompiling the application.
Given the ease and speed of compilation in Go, and the standardization of package structure, this seems to me to be a very viable solution.
Solution 2 : Separate process
It's especially easy in Go to communicate and to handle asynchronous calls. Which means you could define a solution based on many process communicating by named pipes (or any networking solution). Note that there is a rpc package in Go. This would probably be efficient enough for most programs and the main program would be able to start and stop the plugin processes. This could very well feel similar to what you have in Eclipse with the added benefits of memory space protection.
A last note from somebody who wrote several Eclipse plugins : you don't want that mess; keep it simple.
Go 1.8 supports plugins (to be released soon Feb 2017.)
https://tip.golang.org/pkg/plugin/
As dystroy already said, it's not possible to load packages at runtime.
In the future (or today with limitations) it may be possible to have this feature with projects like go-eval, which is "the beginning of an interpreter for Go".
A few packages I found to do this:
https://golang.org/pkg/net/rpc/
https://github.com/hashicorp/go-plugin
https://github.com/natefinch/pie

How to become more productive using Scala? (Tools, IDEs)

What Tools do you people use to work with Scala? For my learning phase, I used the Scala REPL and hacked some code with TextMate and compiled it with the scalac CLI. But as the projects grow in size, much more sophisticated tools are required.
I am aware of the Scala plugins for Elipse, IntelliJ and Netbeans and I tried them all. The best one is IMHO IntelliJ, but still far away from being perfect.
The major issue I have is the lack of auto completion. As a not-so-advanced Scala coder, I still dont know the whole standard API and have to switch between the Scaladoc and IDE regularly. This feels like "killing productivity". But they all fail to auto-complete method arguments. (I heard that method arguments are not included in compiled scala code, but what about attaching source to do auto completion?)
Another very annoying issue is the build process. I am using Maven to build my Scala projects and manage their dependencies. But nevertheless, I have to do a full rebuild to test my changes. Maybe I am spoiled by Eclipses incremental rebuild available in the Java world, but it feels like a big issue to me.
I like Scala very much and I feel way more productive while coding, but the lack of sophisticed tools let me feel less productive. And both seem to cancel out themselves.
So, whats my question? I doubt every single Scala programmer uses good ol' vim or emacs along with scalac to do their work. So what tools do you use? What workflows have you developed to bring speed into developing with the Scala language?
Edit
Clarification what I ment with auto-completion of method arguments.
val myList = "foo" :: "all your base" :: Nil
myList.partition(_.length > 3)
For the code above, IntelliJ fail to provide me with the information that partition requires that I have to pass a () => Boolean function. In fact, IntelliJ does not check for this contraint. I can pass a String and IntelliJ will not indicate my error until I do a compile.
scalac
Get familiar with command line options to Scalac.
-deprecation
-Xprint:all: watch your code progress through compiler phases, very useful to see what implicits are applied.
-help / -X' /-Y` list all options.
The latest nightly builds of scalac include a bash completion file that makes these easier to use.
IntelliJ IDEA
Method completion with Javadoc (CTRL-Space, CTRL-Q/Apple-J) Screenshot
Parameter Info for the example in the question (CTRL-P) Screenshot
Method Argument Completion (CTRL-SHIFT-Space). Screenshot
You need to have the source or javadocs linked into the dependencies in IntelliJ to see the Javadoc.
It doesn't currently highlight type errors on the fly, as there are still too many false-positives in complex code. This is coming, though.
Simple Build Tool
SBT keeps the compiler resident, and analyzes dependencies between classes to allow incremental recompilation. It can also monitor for changes to source files and automatically trigger recompilation and/or test execution.
Continous Compilation: >~compile
Continuous Compilation + Test: ~test-quick
I have SBT and IntelliJ project configured in http://github.com/scalaz/scalaz, you could use this as a reference.
I've been using Scala daily for the last six months. I'm still using vim (and ctags to find stuff), and Maven for builds. I've gotten some good mileage out of JRebel when working on Lift web apps -- it will reload changes on the fly without server restarts.
I spent some time looking into IDEs, but it got depressing really fast. I really missed a lot of Eclipse features at first, but after a period of adjustment I don't think I'm significantly less productive now.
I've heard some rumblings that NetBeans is the current champ for Scala IDEs, but I haven't tried it first hand.
One simple way is to use fsc, an offline compiler. It maintains caches of information, and the standard compiler will talk to fsc (running as a daemon) and use its cached information during compilation, thus speeding up your compilation cycle.
Here's my answer on a similar thread. After giving about an hour to Ensime. I just can't help but get the word out. I must say it's very, very well written for an Emacs package.
I am afraid you have to wait for Scala to become rock-solid.
I had exactly the same issue with Java ten years ago. It was even worse.
I also tried them all. For Scala 2.7.7 IntelliJ is the winner, but for Scala 2.8.0-SNAPSHOT Eclipse is not that bad.
Wait half of a year after 2.8.0 is released and check again. It should become bearable.
With Scala 2.8, please see this for getting better performance out of Maven.
You should also give Netbeans 6.8 a try with the nightly Scala build. I am very satisfied programming Scala with this IDE. For building, I sometimes also use Ant. The best thing about NB Scala plugin is that it is fast and code-completion works flawlessly.
For the example you gave: NB gives me this error
code-completion:
The Eclipse Scala IDE is quite mature now (as of 3.0).

What's the best Scala build system? [closed]

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I've seen questions about IDE's here -- Which is the best IDE for Scala development? and What is the current state of tooling for Scala?, but I've had mixed experiences with IDEs. Right now, I'm using the Eclipse IDE with the automatic workspace refresh option, and KDE 4's Kate as my text editor. Here are some of the problems I'd like to solve:
use my own editor IDEs are really geared at everyone using their components. I like Kate better, but the refresh system is very annoying (it doesn't use inotify, rather, maybe a 10s polling interval). The reason I don't use the built-in text editor is because broken auto-complete functionalities cause the IDE to hang for maybe 10s.
rebuild only modified files The Eclipse build system is broken. It doesn't know when to rebuild classes. I find myself almost half of the time going to project->clean. Worse, it seems even after it has finished building my project, a few minutes later it will pop up with some bizarre error (edit - these errors appear to be things that were previously solved with a project > clean, but then come back up...). Finally, setting "Preferences / Continue launch if project contains errors" to "prompt" seems to have no effect for Scala projects (i.e. it always launches even if there are errors).
build customization I can use the "nightly" release, but I'll want to modify and use my own Scala builds, not the compiler that's built into the IDE's plugin. It would also be nice to pass [e.g.] -Xprint:jvm to the compiler (to print out lowered code).
fast compiling Though Eclipse doesn't always build right, it does seem snappy -- even more so than fsc.
I looked at Ant and Maven, though haven't employed either yet (I'll also need to spend time solving #3 and #4). I wanted to see if anyone has other suggestions before I spend time getting a suboptimal build system working. Thanks in advance!
UPDATE - I'm now using Maven, passing a project as a compiler plugin to it. It seems fast enough; I'm not sure what kind of jar caching Maven does. A current repository for Scala 2.8.0 is available [link]. The archetypes are very cool, and cross-platform support seems very good. However, about compile issues, I'm not sure if fsc is actually fixed, or my project is stable enough (e.g. class names aren't changing) -- running it manually doesn't bother me as much. If you'd like to see an example, feel free to browse the pom.xml files I'm using [github].
UPDATE 2 - from benchmarks I've seen, Daniel Spiewak is right that buildr's faster than Maven (and, if one is doing incremental changes, Maven's 10 second latency gets annoying), so if one can craft a compatible build file, then it's probably worth it...
Points 2 and 4 are extremely difficult to manage with the current scalac. The problem is that Scala's compiler is a little dumb about building files. Basically, it will build whatever you feed it, regardless of whether or not that file really needs to be built. Scala 2.8.0 will have some tremendous improvements in this respect, but until then... Eclipse SDT actually has some very elaborate (and very hackish) code for doing change detection and dependency tracking. On the whole, it does a decent job, but as you have seen, there are wrinkles. Eclipse SDT 2.8.0 will rely on the aforementioned improvements to scalac itself.
So, building only modified files is pretty much out of the question. Aside from SDT, the only tool I know of which even tries this is SBT (Simple Build Tool). It uses a compiler plugin to track files as they are compiled and query the dependency graph computed by the compiler itself. In practice, this yields about a 50% improvement over the recompile-the-world approach. Once again, this is a hack to get around deficiencies in pre-2.8.0 scalac.
The good news is that reasonably fast compilation is still achievable even without worrying about change detection. FSC uses the same technology (ooh, that sounded so "Charlie Eppes") that Eclipse SDT uses to implement fast incremental compilation. In short, it's pretty snappy.
Personally, I use Apache Buildr. Its configuration is significantly cleaner than either Maven's or SBT's and its startup time is orders of magnitude less (when running under MRI). It integrates with FSC and attempts to do some basic change detection on its own (fairly primitive). It also has auto-magical support for the major Scala test frameworks (ScalaTest, ScalaCheck and Specs) as well as support for joint compilation with Java sources and IDE meta generation for IntelliJ and Eclipse. Oh, and it supports all of Maven's features (dependency resolution, etc) and then some. I'm even working on an extension which would allow interactive shell support integrated with JavaRebel and supporting several shell providers (Scala, JIRB, Clojure REPL, etc). It's not ready for the SVN yet, but I'll commit once it's ready (possibly in time for 1.3.5).
As you can see, I'm very firmly of the opinion that Buildr is the best Scala build tool out there. Its documentation is a little spotty where Scala is concerned, but that's because everything is so straightforward that it's hard to document without feeling verbose. You can always check out one of my GitHub repositories for examples. Good luck!
Have you looked at Intellij IDEA and its Scala integration ? Intellij has a loyal (fanatical?) following amongst Java developers, so you may find this is appropriate for your needs.
Am also quite frustrated with the scala plugin on Eclipse and I can add a few more problems to the list:
auto-complete only works some of the time
the debugger doesn't work properly (especially when trying to debug scala xml)
the debugger forgets breakpoints
'go to definition' doesn't work more often than not.
I'm glad to hear that Buildr sounds like a better alternative (on the build front anyhow), I'll give that a try - thanks!
If you use Emacs, I think Ensime is a pretty good IDE. I think at the time writing, Ensime is the only IDE that will give you fast and accurate autocompletion on both Scala and Java objects, including implicit conversions.
There's code browsing support using Speedbar, code templates using the excellent Yasnippet, and code completion menu using Autocomplete. These are all very modern, actively maintained Emacs packages. There's also out of the box incremental building support for Maven and SBT.
There's a lot more in there such as interactive debugging, refactoring, and the Scala interpreter in an inferior process. All the things you want in a modern IDE for Scala is already there in Ensime. Highly recommended for Emacsens.
For the reasons of completeness, I have to say that there is also Pants -- the build tool that in use in Twitter (one of the early scala adopters)
The main difference it that it is intended not only for scala (and written in python, by the way) and is modeled after google build system.
It's not so bloated as sbt, so for the freshmans it's much simplier, but I've never heard about Pants usage outside of twitter and foursquare.
If you scared of SBT, maybe another no-so-popular build tool, ABT, could be an alternative for you?
I went down the same road, and here is where I am at:
- After some initial investigation, I dropped Kate. I love to use it for most things, but when it came to things like defining tab completions, I found it sorely lacking. I would recommend that you look into gedit instead, which is much more robust for Scala development
- With gedit as my editor, I use SBT and have found it to be a great build tool. I can put it into a 'test' mode where when any code changes it recompiles the relevant files and runs my test suite. This has been an extremely effective way to work.
I have not taken a look at Buildr yet. I would like to say that I will, but honestly with SBT at my disposal I don't really have a compelling need to look at another build tool.
If you want to use Eclipse, but build the project using sbt, and still be able to debug, take a look at this post here:
zikaprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/scala-eclipse-sbt-and-debugging/
It also can be applied to builders other than sbt.
The latest version of the Maven Scala plugin supports Zinc/Nailgun for faster start times and faster incremental builds. See Zinc and Incremental Compilation.

Debug console for GWT/GXT

I need to see component tree of the GWT application. DOM tree will be also acceptable. Unfortunatelly GWT hosted browser does not provide access for devToolbar.
The only way I found is to compile to javascript and then use regular browser. But compilation takes enormous ammount of time.
ExtJS has Debug Console, but I was not able to find something similar for GXT.
Please suggest the way you debug visual GWT applications.
Yes, I was just wanting this today FireBug + GWT. If you are adventurous you could look into builds of GWT 2.0 where Out Of Process Hosted Mode will be available letting you debug in FireFox or other browsers. Design: Out of Process Hosted Mode
The source for GWT is here http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/
I personally haven't hit the pain threshold to build this yet because I keep hearing 2.0 is "close"
It's not a debugger in the same mould as Firebug but the GWT Log console is really, really handy for finding out what's happening within the JavaScript.
See: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-log/
Normally one would use the IDE debugger to step through GWT code. but if the problem is a CSS/styling issue (which from the sound of the question, it seems to be), then that might not really help.
i guess compiling it and using firebug is the only tried and true way for css issues.
Why is compilation into (pretty) JavaScript taking so much time? I don't think it should. Perhaps you should disable compilation for irrelevant browsers (irrelevant for debugging purposes), thereby reducing compilation time significantly.
One idea is to minimize compile time by reducing the permutations (different version for each browser) during development.
In your module.gwt.xml force an user agent, for example gecko1_8 (Firefox 2).
<!-- User Agent -->
<set-property name="user.agent" value="gecko1_8" />
If you're using i18n you can also limit the locales used during development.