[josm-dev] Refactoring of the JOSM architecture vs. Plugins

Tom Evans tom_evans_a at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Aug 19 10:08:47 BST 2008


Frederik Ramm wrote:
> All I ever hear is "once we have a proper design, we will..." (be able 
> to improve performance, attract more developers, whatever), and I simply 
> don't believe these claims. As I said before, where are all the Java 
> experts flocking to JOSM-NG because of its clean design? As I said 
> before, it would only take a few Java Expert man-days to get JOSM-NG to 
> "fly".

At the risk of opening another can of worms, I'll venture an answer 
to that.  I don't want to knock Petr in any way, but many people are 
very wary of 'rewriting from scratch'.  The link below has a popular 
explanation, but essentially the fear is that re-implementing all 
the stuff in the existing project will always take far more time 
than expected.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Thus, the big deal about refactoring is not that it is about modern 
design patterns, but it is about keeping the old, slightly wobbly 
JOSM, and changing it bit by bit.  Not by redesigning from scratch. 
  If it was ok to 'modernise' josm a bit, whilst fixing bugs/making 
improvements, that would be ok.  But, unless I misunderstand, you're 
asking for almost a case-by-case proof burden on someone who wants 
to work like that.

Please don't take this personally (either Frederik, or Petr).  I 
think most of us already think the future josm has the best bits of 
josm and josm-ng combined in it.  I'm just attempting to explain why 
many may be reluctant to jump on board with josm-ng right now.

Tom




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