Hi Everyone, It's been quite a while since I have interacted with the group. First of all may I congratulate everyone on the tremendous effort producing repeatedly better versions of NetBeans. Secondly, may I apologise for the length of this email.
I suspect that everyone has forgotten my last email where I personally found the source code hard to read and was going to embark upon an attempt to reformat it. Well, that has turned out to be a significant task requiring a great deal of manual intervention. Originally, I started with 12.1 but soon gave up when 12.2, 12.3 etc rolled on rapidly. So I restarted at version 13. However, not really understanding the structure I began with the ide cluster and after a lot of fumbling around decided that this wasn't the right place and moved to the harness and platform. Like Alice I fell down a rabbit hole into a veritable wonderland of confusion and surprises. A simple, so I thought, reformat turned into: - Reformat to improve readability. - Correct inconsistent formatting within files. - Introduce a consistent use of comments: /** Javadoc */ /* inline (not end of line) code comments */ // Commented out code. - Remove unused imports and use single class imports not * imports. - Update code to be JDK11 compatible - gives cleaner code. Plus this had already been made the minimum requirement for compiling and running the IDE. - Tried to make code GREEN by eliminating as many errors as possible (warnings are just soft errors). - Eliminate, where possible, all obsolete code and preferably deprecated code. That's easier said than done. - Make fields final where possible. - Reduce the use of 'else if', I've never really been a fan but I particularly dislike the lack of a proper implementation of it in Java. - Make return values unmodifiable where necessary/possible. - Make full use of the internal formatter to handle formatting and reduce, as much as possible, any manual intervention. - Remove unnecessary decoration. - Replace anonymous inner classes with lambda expressions where possible. - Remove 'unused assigned values'. - Change conditional statements from: testing a value against a variable, to: testing a variable against a value. - This includes: - ==, != and equals. - Parameters (in my language formal parameters) should be read from and never written to within the method body. Parameters are input to the method while return values and side-effects are the output from the method. - Correct 'inefficient use of string concatenation in logger'. - Constant name does not follow naming conventions. Plus many more... A lot of these where highlighted by the static analyser and therefore were not particularly arduous to deal with. However, the whole process (as yet unfinished) has been time consuming, I have visited some 5000 Java files and many have required multiple passes to deal with all the problems. I estimate that it has taken me approximately 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 12 months. But, I have now reached a point where I have some problems that I cannot find a solution for and need your help/guidance. First, a few of the packages (17 of 114) in platform give me the error message "cannot find item" and in some cases they are in the same package? Secondly, I cannot compile anything and therefore cannot test anything. I get the error message: ant -f /Users/jeremycavanagh/netbeans-jc-cleaned/platform/api.io -Djavac.includes=org/netbeans/api/io/Fold.java compile-single init-tasks: /Users/jeremycavanagh/netbeans-jc-cleaned/nbbuild/default.xml:31: taskdef class org.netbeans.nbbuild.JNLPUpdateManifestStartup cannot be found using the classloader AntClassLoader[] BUILD FAILED (total time: 0 seconds) I can only assume that my setup is incorrect for dealing with the NetBeans source. I am using the source download for NB13 and have not changed anything other than Java files. Kindest regards Jeremy
