Java Shots

September 5, 2014

I work in a Java shop. I'm also a command line guy. I know Bash, Tcsh, a bit of Perl (Perl 6 looks especially interesting, even more so when presented by Damian Conway!), a bit of Python. I love dangling in LISP-like and other functional languages. I also like the idea of squeezing every last CPU cycle out of the hardware, wherefore C and C++ sometimes draws my attention.

BUT

I work in a Java shop. Java is a very effcient platform and I've got no intentions on bashing that language. I mean, it's Turing-complete, right? And the Hotspot compiler makes it very fast. Sometimes I just get the feeling of not being in a Java shop, but in a Maven shop. In an "Everything is a God Damn Object"-shop. In a Framework shop.

BUT

I'm a command line guy and I like writing small programs, scratching the small itches that working as a programmer brings along. I also know that to become good at something you need to do focused practise. I want to be good at Java. So, today I realised that for a long time I have been pondering on how I could scratch those everyday itches using Java.

Then at some point later today I got an idea.

I could write small Java programs as usual, as if they were scripts, compile them and stick them into a ~/javaClasses directory and add that directory to the CLASSPATH env variable. Combine that with a dynamic Bash completion function and I've got something that's almost as easy to use as a plain Bash|Perl|Python script.

	_java()
	{
	local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
	commands=$(for f in $(find ~/javaClasses/ -type f|egrep -v '\$[0-9]'); do echo $(basename $f .class); done|xargs)

	COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$commands" -- $cur) )
	}
	complete -F _java java
	complete -F _java j
      

When I create a new program, just do ". ~/bin/javaclasses_completion" and the program can be auto completed as an argument to "java". Actually I've also got the "alias j=java" Bash alias.

	$ j <TAB>
      

gives all available Java utility programs.

I think that will work for me!