Cleaning up a large, legacy Java project

Question

I\'ve been assigned to do some work on a huge Java project, and the influence of several iterations of developers is obvious. There is no standard coding style, formatting, nam

Answer 1

It's a rather common task, not very joyful but neither a nightmare... It could be worse, if coded in other languages (Perl, PHP, C++, -gasp- VB... ); actually, Java is one the best for your scenario.

Get a decent IDE (Eclipse) and spend a good time understanding dependences and call cycles. It will take a long time to get familiar with everything, so try to make only small changes first.

When documentation is lacking, the IDE (and the static compiling) helps a lot to know who is using which class or method, and you can do refactoring quite confidently. But first try to identify in which layers/packages/classes is reflection used (explicitly by your code, or implicitly by your frameworks - eg. some getters and setters).

There are many books devoted to "Reengineering Legacy Software" and related issues.