penk

Over 5 years ago, I began work on an application called CONGO, a registration and badging system, not only in the vein of "There's gotta be a better way", but also to help out a friend who was running registration at con in Philadelphia.

The first versions of CONGO were crude, but worked well - with a custom Swing interface, custom terminals and servers, it was an impressive setup. What wasn't apparent was this was my first foray into writing any decent sized Java application. I made what I thought at the time were good design decisions, and looking back on 30+ events run, and hundreds of thousands of badges printed, I'd say the design was, for what I knew at the time, solid.

But it's time to change. With everything I've done over the last 3 years in Java and enterprise-level applications, I feel I'm ready to rewrite CONGO into a proper Java based webapp. CONGO 1.0 was part Java, part PHP, part templating. CONGO 2.0 will be a pure java application, based on Struts, and will allow features that I could not shoehorn into the old model

I started work on CONGO2 about a week ago, and I have my first screens working properly and chaining together as they should. Part of this process is factoring in the old logic code, and linking it up with the new presentation layer I'm building using JSPs and Struts. This means making calls to 12,000+ lines of Java code that was written as I was learning the language.

But one thing I did consistently - I documented my methods. Every piece of the CONGO appserver has full Javadocs describing how to call the method, and what it returns

Because I'm doing CONGO2 using modern tools (like Eclipse and Tomcat, my GUI is showing me these docs whenever I try to link to my old code, and is reminding me how to use the old libraries. Why is this remarkable? Because other than generating static documentation, I've never actually seen my own comments and documentation popping in interactive windows in my IDE. Until now.

It gives me a little thrill each time I see my own docs pop up as helper windows in Eclipse, showing me comments I made half a decade ago on structures and calls, and reminding me how to use the system.

It wasn't easy to learn Java, it wasn't easy to learn Swing, it wasn't easy to learn JSPs, JSTL, and Struts. But now I do know them - some more than others, and I'm enjoying this massive refactoring of one of my proudest creations.

Cloned from: Planet Geek!

Category: Programming-fu

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