Chet Haase's Blog

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

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

Comments

• Chet, why not use J2DBench as the application to beautify?

  Cheers,
  Mikael Grev

  Posted by: mgrev on March 17, 2005 at 07:44 PM

• Chet,

  How about trying to determine the most widely used Swing applications from a variety of different areas. The variety of different areas is an effort to reduce the bias towards development tools. Popular applications will tend to be large and therefore harder to work with. However, they will also be realistic examples and improvements made to them will benefit more people. The applications that are chosen can either be somehow improved or deemed perfect.

  My vote is for jEdit. It is extremely useful and for years it was my primary development tool. Unfortunately jEdit has repaint and responsiveness problems that I think are thread related. These problems are far more evident when dealing with files on a slow network file system and/or when switching back and forth between jEdit and other applications.

  - Curt
  

  Posted by: coxcu on March 18, 2005 at 01:24 PM

• I'd also vote for jEdit as I use that alot. Sometimes when I deiconify it hangs for several seconds. I also think NetBeans would be a really good choice. I liked it and thought it had the best features but I abandoned it for Eclipse only, and I mean only, because it was too slow and would hang for unacceptable amounts of time: 2 minutes to deinconify, 10 seconds for a menu drop down! I find that "deiconification" is almost always slow with Swing apps so be sure to consider that.

  Posted by: matthewjones on March 18, 2005 at 03:50 PM

• I just found my first ever applet by browsing the WayBackMachine. It managed to get a Gamelan Prize at the time, but looking at it now, there are a *lot* of problems with it :-) I have fixed a few and put it back online. Check the code on the WayBack site if you want. It has the virtue of being simple.

  Posted by: bblfish on March 21, 2005 at 05:51 AM

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