The Blue Screen of Death
Our group is using JBuilder (on Windows) with ClearCase (UNIX) for version control. I hadn’t used JBuilder for quite a while having gone the route of NetBeans and lately Eclipse for a couple of years now. I have never used ClearCase before. I get the impression it is an old product. The configuration seems very 1970’s IBM-ish, versus subversion which I have been using for some time.
JBuilder has taken the interesting step into the open source world. They bundle Eclipse with a short list of plugins and a UML graphing package. This is good and bad. Eclipse is good, but if we use a non-supplied plugin then the JBuilder warranty is void. They also crippled a couple of standard features of Eclipse that verge on making it useless.
The UML graphing package is supposed to allow reflexive interaction between code and the graphics. However, it kind of doesn’t work. The product attempts to create ‘magic’ class diagrams for every package, but doesn’t do it correctly so things get lost/broken. Then you have to poke around in the source/model tree to delete the junk they created so it will work again (which may mean some of your work just disappeared)
But, let’s get to the BSOD. Either JBuilder (possibly) or ClearCase (possibly) or some silly internal big brother file access watcher (more likely) bit of code will arbitrarily overwrite system memory in the TCPIP system driver causing a BSOD. This can be caused by starting JBuilder, associating your project with ClearCase, refreshing your project, not doing anything at all in JBuilder for an extended period of time or best yet, typing into a java source file.
This was kind of surprising. I have been a long time Windows user so BSOD’s are like old friends (that you want to forget). Aside from this junky code somewhere in this environment I haven’t seen a BSOD for several years now.
Well, it’s a commercial product call JBuilder. Yes, but all the software was bought some time ago without a service agreement. The company will not pay by the hour to figure it out. The expectation is any support will just point at the other players and plead innocent. Instead we have systems engineer types frantically trying all kinds of derivations: new/different Windows image, new/different ClearCase plugin, new/different Virus Protection s/w, …
Needless to say, the project is running behind schedule. There are other reasons for this, but it’s hard to write a line of code without wondering if the next keystroke is going to kill your machine and possibly delete some of your work.