Re: Hello... Tasklist developement question..

On Nov 28, 2003, at 10:57 AM, Trond Norbye wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I'm really glad to see that you are doing cleanup to the tasklist 
> module. I've
> been kind of busy the last year at work, but the fact that you are 
> doing so much
> great "cleanup" to the module has inpired me to try to find some time 
> to get
> back into the project.

Welcome Back!!!  (I'm probably the wrong person to say welcome since 
I've been too busy working on Project Rave even in my spare time to be 
able to do any work on the tasklist. But one of these days....)

> I was therefore wondering if there is something special things that I 
> should
> work on, or if I should "find my own things".
>
> There are some things I would like to clean up:
> * The source code comment parser creates a lot of unneeded String 
> objects. Sice
> we don't need to support java 1.3 anymore (as far as I know) I would 
> like to
> "refactor" this support to use StringBuffers and the internal regexp 
> library...

I vaguely remember doing the last part already - migrating the code 
away from org.apache.regexp  and using java.util.regex instead.

But yes, the scanner could definitely use some work, especially the one 
which works only in comments; if I recall correctly, it's splitting 
each and every line up into a separate String. It would be ideal if you 
could for example just scan the source, and identify each comment range 
starting and ending index, and then do a regexp match (with a 
precompiled regular expression) on each range.
>
> * The "date selection panel" could probably be modified to use a 
> JSpinner to
> select the time instead of the JTextFields it use...

Yes. And I think that the date customizer could use some other 
usability enhancements too; I don't remember what they are at the 
moment, but I remember noticing a couple of things last time I used it. 
  Take a look at for example Evolution or some commercial alternatives 
if you have them available.

>
> What do you think (or should I just "go back to sleep"? ;)

I think it would be really useful if you could do work to get the 
"other" suggestion providers working, since Petr is focusing on the 
docscan module (and copyright? I see that it was split apart from the 
docscan module, but I don't know if that means copyright will no longer 
be supported or if it was for purity reasons only.), and Tim is 
focusing on the compiler module. (By the way Tim - any chance the 
compiler module can be integrated with the javaparser module soon? 
(Yes, I know it's difficult. But it would be OH so cool!  Compile 
Project. Shift Select Errors. Click Fix. Voila.)

In particular, pmd, javaparser, and javadoc. I see that the pmd guys 
are going to provide auto fixers for their rules soon (I already have 
some for pmd in the tasklist/pmd module). It would be cool to make sure 
these are integrated - and of course to include the latest version of 
pmd, since they have some cool new rules.  Also, the javaparser could 
use some new autofixers - and this is pretty fun programming I think: 
identify a compiler error javac produces, and see if you can come up 
with some heuristics for suggesting how the error could be fixed. 
Adding try/catch blocks is hard without an AST for the code, but other 
errors, such as figuring out that the user has copied a class file but 
forgotten to rename the constructor, is pretty straightforward.

And, wouldn't it be cool to offer to automatically upgrade code? E.g. 
"I see you're using org.apache.regexp, shall I convert to 
java.util.regex?.  Or perhaps a more practical example, offer to fix 
@deprecated method calls with the new "correct" APIs (when possible or 
straightforward; sometimes deprecated methods are more difficult to 
fix. But you can easily scan the JDK javadocs for example and see all 
the places where they're saying - deprecated - use <method> instead. 
This is a simple map, which should easily lend itself to a javaparser 
module autofix suggestion.)

-- Tor