Developing in Windows, 3 weeks in.
11 Apr 2006So it’s been ~3 weeks since I switched my primary development environment from Ubuntu to Windows.
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out (been a Linux user for the better part of the past 12 years), but I’ve actually been quite happy. All my tools (Eclipse, JRockit, ant, svn, etc.) worked pretty much out of the box. I do have cygwin installed and my terminal of choice is rxvt, so I haven’t completely abandoned the relative comfort of Unix.
My initial reason for switching to Windows had to do primarily with performance. Sun’s jdk on Windows was substantially faster than the equivalent on Linux. I don’t have concrete runtime numbers but JBoss was starting up in 1/3 the time. That did serve as a bit of a catalyst to make the necessary changes to the codebase so that we could run with JRockit (we use xstream for xml [de]serialization and it has a problem with some jre’s and private final variables). JRockit on Linux did bring the JBoss startup time down, but java on windows still feels faster even if it really isn’t.
I did run into a rather annoying problem today tho. I needed to do some packet sniffing on my localhost but it turns out that the Windows tcp/ip stack doesn’t have a true loopback (ala Linux) and Ethereal wasn’t able to pick anything up. A minor inconvience but one nonetheless.
I will return to Linux development (at some point), but it’s been nice to be able to come home, fire up some rxvt’s and do a bit of development. Much easier than having to dual-boot everytime I want to look over some code. I haven’t really looked into it, but perhaps there might be a virtualization alternative using VMware or perhaps even coLinux.
My development machine is a Dell Latitude 2ghz centrino with 2gigs of ram. It’s been able to handle most everything I’ve thrown at it and there weren’t many problems in terms of unsupported hardware in either Linux or Windows. Next on the upgrade path is a dual-core 
Must Haves for Windows Development
- Cygwin (and rxvt)
- EditPlus
- Ethereal
- Psi (Jabber client)
- and the usuals (Eclipse/IntelliJ, JRockit, ant, Apache)