[ jEdit-devel ] Structure of the JEdit (OO Design)

[Hayden M. <hm...@ec...>]

Hi all,

I am a PhD student at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. As part of=
 my
research I have performed an empirical study on a large corpus of open-so=
urce
Java software (e.g. Eclipse, Netbeans, Ant, Tomcat, JMeter, POI, and many=
 more).
If you are a developer of JEdit you might be interested to know that ther=
e are
134 java source files in JEdit all involved in a big dependency cycle (or=
 to use
the graph theory term: strongly connected component). Though there are ma=
ny
dimensions to design quality, it is thought long dependency cycles among =
source
files inhibit understanding, testing and reuse.

In any case, a comparison of JEdit to all the other applications in the c=
orpus
is available on my webpage, along with a more detailed description of the=
 study
and why cycles are bad:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~hayden/corpus.htm


(The description of why cycles are bad is available here:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~hayden/research.htm  )

Cheers,
/
Hayden Melton