Recent Software Development Posts of Interest - Early June 2012

There has recently been a large number of posts on some of my favorite topics and I summarize and reference a few of them here.

Why Developers Should Blog

I devoted a post to why I believe more software developers should write blogs. Ron Gross's post Why you should write a blog post today provides five reasons to write technical blog posts and contrasts blogs to other social media to demonstrate technical memento advantages of blogs.

NetBeans 7.2 Search Capability

There has been significant coverage of NetBeans 7.2 beta in recent weeks. Much of the focus has been on its improved performance, its greater helpfulness and its TestNG support. Geertjan Wielenga focuses on improved searching capability in NetBeans 7.2 beta in his post Beefed Up Code Navigation Tools in NetBeans IDE 7.2.

Running Common Java Development Tools with Ant

Modern Java IDEs often make it easy to integrate Java tools. An example is the NetBeans SQE plugin. However, not all Java development and execution necessarily occurs in the IDE. In addition, some projects may use more than one IDE. In such cases, command-line approaches have their advantages. These can be even easier to use when run as Ant targets. The post How to run Findbugs, Pmd, Checkstyle, JUnit and Cobertrua with an Ant Build-Script? covers using Ant to run popular Java development tools FindBugs, PMD, Checkstyle, JUnit, and Cobertura.

Upgrading Gradle

I think that Gradle has a lot of potential for being a very popular build tool if it can gain enough early traction. The post Upgrading Gradle demonstrates how easy it is to upgrade one's Gradle installation ("It’s basically the same as upgrading ant.").

SVG, FXML, and NetBeans

The post SVG to FXML using NetBeans comprehensively covers issues related to transforming SVG to FXML and ends with a link to another post showing how to use NetBeans to demonstrate the transformation.

Conclusion

There have been numerous posts in recent weeks on some of my favorite topics: NetBeans, blogging, Gradle, and JavaFX. This post has referenced a sample of these posts.