[Javacavemaps-developers] our project..

[Larry G. <jav...@ya...>]

Well let me say a few things here. Back when I began programming we were using BASIC and programming was far simpler.  To complicate it at that time 
we had branching, loops and subroutines. IO was either console or file io.  OOP complicates things a lot and why? Because its a effort to simply things. Ha-ha.  Well on the most basic level it provides a good way to organize things.  Objects organizes subroutines, funcitons and data. In Java this is called methods and fields.  Packages organze groups of objects. Api's organize groups of packages.  Beyond this organization or grouping is something called
patterns or industry standards or formally recoginzed ways to group things. As we begin this software we will not mess with patterns to much. We will no
fix the problem until we have the problem. Paterns should emerge over time. So in starting we will simply group things the best way we can. This idea
of the core and then the components that the sf user wags had was good, I adpated to that.  There is also this concept of Aspect Oriented Programming, there is also Functional Programming.  More high level concepts.   We won't mess with those but I do see how there could be some room for those concepts even in an OOP language like Java.  Other methodologies I've recently heard of, RUP, Rational Unified Process and SCRUM whatever that is.  I think some of the folks that didnt' stay on this project wanted to do things the old way with huge up front planning and design.  Well anyway we won't do things that way.  So right now it boils down to finding the core abstractions. OOP atempts to model the problem.  In our problem we have these core components to model.
Mapping
1. Line
2. Room
3. Branch
4. Survey
5. Survey group
6. Cave
7 Cave group


Unfortunaly or forunatly however you look at it. We have 4 methods of deployment to complicate things. I could simplify by saying
lets just do the GUI application. But I wanted the greater chances of having our application appreciated by a wider audiance.

1. Application
2. Applet
3. Webstart
4. Webapp


We were basically working on #1 in the first list and #1 #2 #3 of the 2nd list.
We have the basic components already made we just need to shape things up a bit and start putthing things together.

Larry Gray
la...@ar...