Recently I decided I wanted to learn Java again. I last programmed in Java when I was in College and that was the main language they taught in. I wouldn’t say I was a great Java developer, although I completed every Java course well enough to get an A or better.
I want to relearn Java because for the past four years I have primarily focused on Python. While it is a great language, I feel I need a change from what I’m focusing on now with primarily web based programming.
I decided to refresh myself with Java and read a “Java for Python developers” guide, which was a great refresher. After that I sat around wondering what to program, inspiration wasn’t coming quickly. I settled on a SSH Configuration Manager, which is something I’ve wanted for a while now.
This Configuration Manager will read in your ~/.ssh/config files, and show you what hosts you have in a GUI interface. The great part of it will be that you can also create new ssh configurations, without having to remember every little detail. There will be a lot of help tooltips, and pre-fills as well. I have a pretty basic idea of what I want it to look like. Ideally a list on the far left with +/- buttons to add a new Host, and to the right of that will be another hierarchy list of all the key groups you can change, with the most common (that I or people I talk to) being in a “General” or “Common” list. To the right of that will be the actual keys and values you change. I think I would like to be able to “favorite” keys that you use frequently. This way when you create a new host entry, you can quickly fill out your usual configurations be it only adding an IdentityFile and User. Another feature I thought of would be copying/templating, for example being able to create a new “work based server” configuration by just copying one you already have.
Some of the options will be a bit tricky, a couple of them are along the lines of allowing “yes”, “no”, “ask”, or an integer, and I haven’t figured out exactly how I want to manage that yet.
Currently I have a model that only has getters/setters and toString support, there’s a lot of them so it’s already a 1050 line file last I checked. Next time I work on this project I want to start with data validation and learning how to write tests in Java. I think learning good BDD or TDD habits while learning a “new” language would definitely benefit me.
