JDG* seeks bad code for good time

"Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

[from a poem by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty pedestal]

Okay, so this references is a bit over the top here, but there's nothing like a good (or bad) literary allusion.

Here's the deal:

We in the Desktop Client group are running two JavaOne sessions:

• Looking Good
• Running Fast

The intent here is to take Real World applications and improve them, either in the way they look and feel, or in the way they perform, and in the end come up with good case studies of how developers might use the same techniques to improve their own applications.

Of course, we could come up with our own demo applications that cover the bases. We have certainly seen our share of common application mishaps that we could construct reasonable case studies on our own. But wouldn't it be more interesting, and more useful, to see an example of actual code from the Real World instead? And wouldn't it be more useful to you if it was your code that you got some free hacking on?

So think about code that you are working on. Maybe there is an open source project that you'd love to have tuned. Or an enterprise application that could stand a facelift. Tell us about it and let's see if we can get cranking on it.

Send all entries to desktopjavacode-javaone2005@sun.com by March 31. At that time, we will go through all of the entries and let people know if we are going to use their code.

Caveats (because there have to be some):

• Code must be untainted: We have to have the rights to look at the code, to work on it, and to display the results (both the old code and our new changes) in public. This could eliminate many internal or commercial applications from the running due to normal legal hassles; perhaps open source projects are where we should focus just to avoid headaches.
• Code must be dependency-free: To have a hope of pulling this off, we need to be unfettered from such things as having to install and set up a database in order to work on or run the application. The more standalone, the better.

*JDG == Java Desktop Geek