http://cumulus.ixcode.org an experiment in OO design Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:07:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This was brutal. At the beginning, I had two classes that were more than 100 lines long (the target: 50). Not only that, I hadn't been using packaging properly, so I had one very large package and a few tiny ones. I find it useful to think about this ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/04/03/rule-6-ok-most-of-7-8-and-9-too-keep-all-entities-small/ For this refactor I renamed a few classes and a relative lot of variables and fields. It felt good. I kind of felt like I had just taken a nice hot shower after swimming in the Charles. Not only did I get rid of abbreviations, I also renamed after thinking a ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/04/03/friendly-coins-rule-5-no-abbrvs/ When I embarked on this refactor, I hadn't yet got to the point of minimizing the calls to the horrible WrappedInteger.intValue() method. What ended up happening is having a load of extra lines to assign the .intValue() to a temporary variable, subsequently used on the next line. Yuck. ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/04/03/friendly-coins-rule-4-one-dot-per-line/ This was rather invasive. The motive behind it (this is from Jeff's article) is to add semantics to the use of atomic values; and also (a side benefit), give you a chance to stick behavior on those "small objects". In the Friendly Coins problem, it's fairly clear there are at ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/04/03/friendly-coins-rule-3-wrap-all-primitives-and-strings/ For some reason I expected that I would have a bunch of else's. I didn't. There were a grand total of four. Not much to say on this then. For the most part, it's what you'd expect (but I'm saving the best for last, hang in ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/04/03/friendly-coins-rule-2-dont-use-the-else-keyword/ For the friendly-coins project, my strategy is to start from a completed project, and apply refactorings to arrive at a codebase obeying the Nine Rules. I think this will be interesting for at least a couple reasons: It'll give me a chance to see which of the Nine I tend to diverge ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/03/23/friendly-coins-stage-1-only-one-level-of-indentation-per-method/ Hi! First blog post from me.  In at attempt to kill two birds with one stone, I'm: Starting a new small project, called friendly-coins. This project happens to be a suggestion for a new Coding Problem. Therefore we get a solution to the problem, as well as some Object Calisthenics. The ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/03/23/new-sub-project-in-the-svn-repo-friendly-coins/ After much palaver involving moving the directory structure around, I finally had it working and then remembered about googlecode. As it give quite a nice browsing experience, allows you to review code and also to make comments, I thought I would move it over there. You can now find it at ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/03/18/code-is-moved-to-googlecode/ We have moved the source code into a sub directory in the svn repository. We have decided to call our first project "feedcloud" because its intent is to turn a feed into a tag cloud. This will allow us to add more projects along the way so that others can ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/03/18/created-a-sub-project/ So we only got about half a day today but completed a small spike getting the database set up correctly. I also had some interesting feedback from Jeff around static methods which I have written up here. Our DB spike simply does a set of CRUD against mysql, so now everything ... http://cumulus.ixcode.org/2009/03/07/day-3/