Introduction

[Robin Stevens]

Hello,

now that my OCA has been accepted, it is about time to introduce myself.

I have been working with Java professionally for 8 years now at a company
called Luciad in Belgium (http://luciad.com/). We are developing GIS
software, and our desktop products are written in Java.

For those interested in what we make, our corporate website hosts some
videos (http://luciad.com/resources/videos), or you can browse to
http://3d.luciad.com/ to see a demo of our RIA product (which is written in
JS, but our Java product has the same functionality).

Reason for joining is mainly to be able to fix issues in the JDK I
encounter in my day-to-day job. For example we recently started working on
supporting OS X, and after letting our existing test suite run on a Mac we
found some issues which weren't present on other operating systems (mainly
Aqua look-and-feel issues).

For the majority of those issues, fixing the issue in the JDK was easier
then trying to work around it in our code.

By now, I already have made some contributions. I am going to hijack my own
introduction to immediately ask some questions to which I did not found an
answer in the documentation. If somebody could answer those, or point me in
the direction of the correct documentation page, it would be greatly
appreciated:

- I already gained access to the JIRA bug tracker by becoming an author. If
I stumble upon a new issue, can I log it directly in JIRA instead of having
to go through http://bugs.java.com/ ? If so, is there a specific template I
have to follow (like most of the existing bugs seem to be doing).

- As my contributions will mostly be in the JDK code (and not in the other
tools), is there some documentation on the recommended development setup
and IDE integration ? My current way of working is really slow: write the
failing test - adjust the code (without an IDE) - rebuild the whole JDK
(and hope I didn't make a typo) - re-run the test and hope it passes. This
is not only slow, there is also no way to do proper debugging except
spamming the code with System.outs.
I was hoping to be able to use an IDE to work on the Java side of the JDK,
just like you would do for any other project.

Regards,

Robin