${Markup(_('Fedora Project - Interview with Chris Bredesen.'))}

${Markup(_('← Back to the main \'Using Fedora\' page.'))}

${_('Chris, Java Web Application Developer')}

${_('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.')}

Chris Bredesen

${_('Where are you from?')}

${_('Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Living in Holly Spring, NC currently.')}

${_('What is your profession?')}

${Markup(_('Principal Software Engineer at <a href=\"http://redhat.com\">Red Hat</a>.'))}

${_('What\'s your IRC nick?')}

${_('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).')}

${_('How did you first become a Java developer?')}

${_('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.')}

${_('When did you first start using Fedora?')}

${_('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.')}

${_('Tell us which 5 applications in Fedora you find most helpful for Java development in Fedora. What does each app do?')}

${_('In no particular order:')}

  1. ${Markup(_('<strong>OpenJDK</strong> - having a high-quality, open-source JVM installed and updated in Fedora is a huge benefit.'))}
  2. ${Markup(_('<strong>Eclipse</strong> - my IDE of choice, packaged in Fedora.'))}
  3. ${Markup(_('<strong>Git</strong> - amazing distributed version control system.'))}
  4. ${Markup(_('<strong>bash/zsh</strong> - I can\'t effectively do my job without a real shell. :)'))}
  5. ${Markup(_('<strong>meld</strong> - Nice visual diff tool.'))}

${_('Tell us about some interesting desktop customizations you\'ve done to your Fedora desktop to help your Java development workflow.')}

${_('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.')}

${_('Can you tell us about a Java application you recently made using Fedora?')}

${Markup(_('I\'m currently leading development of the <a href="%s">Red Hat Customer Portal</a>. 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 <a href="%s">http://access.redhat.com</a>. We\'re using the <a href="%s">SEAM framework</a> in building it.') % ('http://access.redhat.com', 'http://access.redhat.com', 'http://seamframework.org'))}

${_('If you have a co-worker who doesn\'t use Fedora, can you still work on the same Java project together? How does that work?')}

${Markup(_('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 <a href="%s">Red Hat Customer Portal</a> running and connected to our Git repository.') % 'http://access.redhat.com')}

${_('Do you have any tips for enthusiastic future Fedora Java developers taking their first steps in using Fedora to create awesome Java apps?')}

${_('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.')}

${_('Thanks, Chris!')}

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