As a programmer, we are always looking to spend less time coding and debugging, but still produce more code. This dichotomy is what some programmers fight with on a daily basis. Whether we go to a 1 hour meeting where it was scheduled for 15 minutes, or whether we get interrupted by our colleagues, or whether we get lost in translations between languages, the coding did stop.
Bill Gates said: "Just in terms of allocation of time and resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing Sunday morning." Some programmers are agnostic but still feel the same about their allocation of time. Microsoft announced a new "beta" release of IE with a development center with free tools and resources built so web programmers can spend less time testing for the various version of Internet Explorer and more time building code.
In the many years of programming in Pick, Revelation, Prime Information, Universe, and Unidata to name a few, there has never been a mention to help us programmers with the allocation of our resources to produce more code. Of course, if we skip the little problem of testing all of our code production would be massive and we would be getting raises until they tested it.
Our tool, XLr8Editor, has some new features that have saves our staff about an hour or two a day. The first feature is synchronization engine. The second is task tags.
Let's start with the synchronization engine. Since Eclipse stores all of your programs locally as you are editing them and writes them to the database when you are done, other programmers may change that code or other code throughout the day. You just right click on your basic program file or dictionary file, or your procedure (proc) file and the system synchronizes your local copy with the database. You can click on each difference and see the "diff" editor what has been changed. You can click on the incoming sync icon and have all your local code updated. If you run process that updates code at TCL/ECL then this is a real time saver.
The second is task tags. Java programmer and other have had task tags for years. Now courtesy of XLr8Editor and Eclipse U2 programmers can have them too. Task tags are used a reminders of actions, work to day, or other actions you would need. The Eclipse standards task tags of FIXME, TODO, and XXX are included. You can add your own because the engine will find them. Now instead of comments in code you can never find you can put TODO's or FIXME's and every programmer using XLr8Editor will be able to see them in the Marker view. We use that to keep track of what we have left to do in a program before it goes into productions. The time savings can be big when you have to ESEARCH your code for these things.
If we could quantify the savings in our programmer's time, we could have save about 5 hours a week or 250 hours per year. For management that is a lot of programmer time. This time can be used for cutting more code.
"Thanks U2logic"
