What does "refactoring" of a project mean ?

Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the firs
t 100 items).

Anan

"Anan H. Samiti" <anan22@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ce5of5$5kc$04$1@news.t-online.com...
> Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
> I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the
first 100 items).
>
> Anan
>

The process of reviewing and improving code.
There are IDE's that specialise in assisting this kind of thing.
You can review call trees, see where a method is used, rename
variables/classes more appropriately etc.

--
Mike W

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 16:22:30 +0200, anan22@hotmail.com (Anan H.
Samiti) wrote or quoted :

>Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/refactoring.html

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

Anan H. Samiti wrote:

>Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
>I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the fir
st 100 items).
>
>Anan
>
>
A quite good explanation (at least in my opinion) is given at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refactoring  (espcially the first 2
paragraphs there)

--
Thomas<dot>Fritsch<squiggle>ops<dot>de

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Anan H. Samiti wrote:

> Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
> I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the first 100 
items).

Refactoring is improving the design of existing code. It does not add new
feature or change the behaviour of the existing features. It improves the
internal structure. It is just a way of making the code more maintainable.
Over time, software will become difficult and costly to maintain. By
occasionally refactoring it, you will be able to avoid this.

--
Send e-mail to: darrell at cs dot toronto dot edu
Don't send e-mail to vice.president@whitehouse.gov

Anan H. Samiti wrote:
> Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
> I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the first 100 
items).

http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/refactor.html

/Thomas

> Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
> I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the
first 100 items).
>
http://www.refactoring.com/

--
Andrei Kouznetsov
http://uio.dev.java.net Unified I/O for Java
http://reader.imagero.com Java image reader

In article <ce5of5$5kc$04$1@news.t-online.com>,
anan22@hotmail.com (Anan H. Samiti) wrote:

> Can someone explain me what "refactoring" of a (java) project mean?
> I searched in google for a good explanation but found only mess (in the fi
rst
> 100 items).

Refactoring is simply code improvement done mostly through code movement
or minor changes.  For example, renaming a method from "dagnabit" to
"searchForDuplicates" is a simple refactoring.  Extracting the
"searchForNextToken" guts of "searchForDuplicates" is another, and
useful if more than one routine needs it.  It is something that most
developers do on a regular basis, but having a set of common names for
the actions, and some agreement on a basic set of such actions, makes it
more likely that IDE makers will support these actions.

Martin Fowler wrote a book called "Refactoring" in which he popularized
this term.  He also categorized them, and suggested that IDEs should do
some of this automatically.  This push led, I suspect, to its heavy
influence on XP and the inclusion of so-named refactoring support in
IDEA, Eclipse, and TogetherJ.

What makes it better than glorified cut and paste is the understanding
your IDE can have of your code.  For example, you could do a search and
replace to find the "dagnabit" calls I mentioned above, but if you are
moving methods to a subclass, or perhaps adding a parameter to a method,
the search and replace gets a lot harder to write without introducing
errors.  Further, computers tend to be good at repetitive tasks like
adding a default value to every use of a method.

Scott

"Scott Ellsworth" <scott@alodar.com> wrote in message
news:scott-7B2302.13445527072004@news.west.cox.net...
> What makes it better than glorified cut and paste is the understanding
> your IDE can have of your code.

I agree that a good IDE makes Refactoring alot easier and safer but the
precondition to refactoring is a suite of solid tests.

Shane

--
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/custo...stimonials.html

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Shane Mingins wrote:

> "Scott Ellsworth" <scott@alodar.com> wrote in message
> news:scott-7B2302.13445527072004@news.west.cox.net... 
>
> I agree that a good IDE makes Refactoring alot easier and safer but the
> precondition to refactoring is a suite of solid tests.
>
> Shane
>
> --
> http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/custo...stimonials.html

In the filesystem pane Netbeans lets me rename classes and will
automatically update at least the class name, which is good, but then I
have to click around to fix the comments.  It'd almost be easier to use vi
and do the /$/whatever search and replace.

This goes to what tools you know; blah blah when you have a hammer blah
blah something about nails and how everything looks like a .... nail.

I can't believe renaming a few classes counts as refactoring.  Isn't
refactoring inherently painful?  doesn't it more often mean re-design and
doing away with stuff and adding new stuff and simplifing the API, etc?


Thufir Hawat
<http://www.shaw.ca/members/hawat/source/>