Hi Sharan and Everyone, When we lost Adrian in the beginning of the rewrite project I really felt lost. His feedback made things simple and I miss having him around for mentoring and feedback. I think deferring the rewrite project is a good idea for now.
I shifted my energy into just playing with the code and dabbling here and there and I got surprised by the many problems that exist pretty much everywhere. This would be things like: - Extending classes from external libraries into the core APIs - Writing to implementations instead of interfaces - Files too long - Different levels of abstractions mixed together - Poor test coverage, lack of TDD - Implicit (hidden) dependencies (I dislike this the most) I think the above issues indicate that we really do need less energy on new features, and much more on refactoring. We should refactor everything including core API interfaces. Some examples of work we can do: - EntitySaxReader implements javolution interfaces and looks hideous - HtmlFormRenderer is 3000 lines of code and the interfaces it implements are also huge - XmlFormRenderer does not implement more than half of the methods - Lots of dependencies on deprecated classes / constructors (e.g. HtmlScreenRenderer, FoScreenRenderer) - Start.java has some problems which I'm trying to tackle in JIRA: OFBIZ-6783 - Lots of non-parameterized and non type checked declarations. - Implementations with no interfaces (e.g. TemporalExpression, GroupModel, Cache, etc ...) The list goes on and on. Every one of the SOLID principles for Bob Martin is violated in many places and most of the code smells in his book also exist. I started a thread a while back suggesting that I would like to start refactoring without too many JIRAs because it would slow us down. However, the feedback from the community I got is that JIRA creation is preferred. This, however, would slow down progress especially if I'm just making minor one-line changes. We need an efficient way to make continuous daily improvements to the code base. Also, we need to document our design philosophy for others to consider when writing code. I don't mean just formatting conventions but also things like writing to interfaces, TDD, design rules specific to OFBiz, and so on. To summarize: - We have a LOT of refactoring work, it's everywhere - We need a more efficient workflow for continuous daily refactoring, the current workflow is too bureaucratic - We need help from everyone - We need to expand the coding guidelines to introduce some design concepts, not just formatting. Those are my very long 2 cents. Taher Alkhateeb On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 8:19 PM, Sharan-F <sharan.f...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Everyone > > A few months ago we started looking at a proposed framework re-write sub > project with Adrian as our mentor. > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Potential+Framework+Project+for+the+Foundation+Sub+Component > > With Adrian gone it makes it hard for us to continue so have decided to > abandon this effort. > > We don't want to give up on having a better framework and know that another > option is to tidy up our existing framework. (So yes – this means > refactoring, and yes it will be a lot of work) > > In general we do sometimes tidy up or refactor as we go along and some work > has already started with movement of entity definitions into a separate > datamodel component. If we really do want to tidy up our framework then we > will need as many people from the community as possible to help out. > > Now here comes the big question – is the community interested in really > doing this and are there people out there willing to help out? > > Thanks > Sharan > > > > > > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Framework-Cleanup-Options-Tidy-Up-Refactor-tp4676797.html > Sent from the OFBiz - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >
