Here is the latest from my friend with regards to this.
I understand all this. I know you're trying to help and I do appreciate it,
really. But so you know. converting from AWT to Swing is secondary to the
problem we face. The first problem we have is the source was developed with
the Visual Cafe' IDE and imports Visual Cafe' classes that we don't have
because we don't have Visual Cafe' anymore. I need to focus on getting that
stuff out of there.
The next issue is the AWT to Swing conversion. And strictly speaking, this
is also something that does not have to be done. This is more of a strategic
decision we have to make if we're going to bring this product forward with
everything else. Accordingly, this is a situation where I have to give pause
because the code is such a mess regardless of the GUI implementation(AWT vs.
Swing). This is the central to what Amudha and have discussed several times
in the past few weeks. The code was written so poorly and is so poorly
organized and difficult to follow from a developer standpoint, that we're
questioning the wisdom of investing a lot of time with it in it's current
state.
What I mean by this is the class names are usually default names assigned by
the IDE or names from snippets of code he took from books that don't give
the reader any clue what the purpose and function of the code might be. So
with 99% of it, you have to follow the logic to understand what it is doing.
Believe me, after a couple hours of this, it gets very tedious. So given the
amount of time required to understand and clean it up, coupled by the fact
that it doesn't really do all that much (log in/out of mobilegate, loopback
messages and write a few statistics to a database), we may be better off
re-writing it using more robust programming technique. You know, the "should
we really try to build a Porche from a Volkswagon or just start with a
Porche instead" sort of thing.
When I originally described the situation to you, you may have missed some
of these subtle points because of your level of understanding about Java.
When I talked about AWT, my point was that Beck decided to use it instead of
Swing. which was a poor choice given the option to use Swing. I think I said
that the version of Visual Cafe' that he first used to create the code may
not have supported Swing. Which was possible back in 1999, but I don't know
that for certain. Its also equally possible that he made a bad decision
because he really wasn't a very experienced developer. At the time he was
the only one that really knew anything about Java too, so no one else could
really question or challenge his decisions accordingly.
We'll eventually figure something out here. What I'll probably do is just
comment out the Visual Cafe classes and see if I can get it to build. Which
brings me to yet another issue. With VisualAge for Java, our primary Java
development tool here, it generates a lot of code automatically for you.
Thereby, reducing a lot of time and effort when writing GUI based Java
applications. So until I spend some quality time with this code in the
VisualAge IDE, I won't really know if we'll be able to extend the
functionality very easily or not. If we can't extend it very easily that's
all I need to decide to start over....
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