[josm-dev] Difference between JOSM and JOSM-NG

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> To me rewrites look like dead-born projects most of the time. Why not 
> fix josm instead? I never understood, why total rewrites from scratch 
> should be useful. Every software can be moved to a new and better design 
> step by step.

JOSM does carry a lot of baggage. JOSM-NG more or less started as a 
speed/memory usage demonstrator; there was considerable discussion about 
whether or not something or other - I forgot the details - could be 
achieved with Java at all, so Petr created JOSM-NG to show that you 
could indeed also write fast Java applications.

Even if nothing else should become of it, JOSM-NG would still serve as a 
  good example on how to handle the large number of objects we have in 
an efficient manner, and JOSM could learn a lot from it.

Gerv also hinted at the fact that JOSM is written in a way that is 
somewhat untypical for Java, and whenever a newcomer to JOSM programming 
said "this is all bullshit let's refactor it wholesale" I told them to 
please find another project to refactor wholesale. I always thought that 
the peculiar way in which JOSM is done has a lot going for it and makes 
it easy to work with the code.

That having said, if at any time someone who has already done a lot of 
JOSM development would step forward and suggest major changes, I believe 
that would be a whole different thing than coming from someone who has 
yet to submit a single patch.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"