In the olden days, I used to work with a great programmer named Phil Karlton. We worked on a real-time OS that ran on an SGI Indy and tried to make it become a set-top box for interactive TV...
However, in the early days, nothing was stable at all. Not the tools, the OS, the server side, the database - NOTHING. Each morning was a two hour fun-fest of fixes to your personal sandbox before what you had yesterday would come close to working.
Some days, you'd call Phil over to understand why your build was broken, or the code didn't work. He'd look at your versions, and look at the problem, and then usually say: "It works for me."
Which was basically a curmudgeonly way of saying: get on the right train, use the right versions, and do what I'm doing if you want anything to work...
So although Phil passed away in a tragic accident, I think I'd know what he'd say about working with the Google AdWordsAPI. If I were smart instead of stubborn, I'd have the same development environment as the Google team. As near as I can tell that would be:
- Linux
- Java
- Eclipse IDE
- Apache Axis with SAX 2.0
