Chris Bredesen is a Java developer from Ft. Lauderdale who uses Fedora as his primary development platform. Chris gives his top 5 picks of tools in Fedora for Java development, as well as advice for Java developers considering a move to Fedora.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Living in Holly Spring, NC currently.
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.
When I'm on Freenode/Codehaus, etc, I use 'cbredesen' so as to be transparent about my identity. Here at Red Hat, I go by 'breddy' which is a casual shortening of my last name given to me by a college buddy. I decided to keep it as a nick because it is vaguely similar to the first name of one of my Norwegian ancestors, Brede, (from whom my last name is derived).
My degree is in Computer Science but I'd not been interested in a career in software development for whatever reason so I went down the sysadmin path. I had been doing server administration for many years, building mainly departmental and corporate Windows networks. I decided to get back into programming around 2001 and, due to circumstances, moved into a role doing Visual Basic development. Not long after I joined, we changed platforms from VB/C++/Windows to Java/*NIX/Linux. The rest is history.
Most of my development career has been devoted to the architecture and development of mid- to large-scale web-based e-commerce systems. That sort of work takes most of my time but I've got a few related projects in the works that I intend to release to the community and hopefully package for Fedora.
In no particular order:
I've spent significant time in GNOME, KDE and XFCE. I've customized the desktop environment in many ways and arrived back at a fairly vanilla GNOME setup with Gnome-Do as a launcher. The only real customization I've done to the system I've flirted with is moving from Bash to Zsh due to some of the built-in command completion that Zsh offers. Most of the workflow involved in creating Java applications is to do with the code/test/commit cycle made possible with Git, Maven and some of the other tools we use.
I'm currently leading development of the Red Hat Customer Portal. This is a group of applications tied together by a Seam web application built on Fedora and running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and RHEL. You can visit it at http://access.redhat.com. We're using the SEAM framework in building it.
Absolutely! The Java Virtual Machine is available for all major platforms and the same code runs anywhere. In fact my current team consists of a graphic artist running Mac OS X - he's got a full copy of the Red Hat Customer Portal running and connected to our Git repository.
Just to be aware that many of the tools that Java developers already know and love are available right out of the box in Fedora. A dev workstation that would take me hours or even days to build with Windows or Mac OS X can be installed and running in less than an hour, thanks to Yum and all the great OSS software that Fedora has built and packaged.
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