Re: [Openrpg2 dev] First try at providing some help

[Mark T. <ma...@ly...>]

Bi!  Welcome aboard!

Mykel Alvis wrote:
> Hi folks,
> I'm new to OpenRPG2, although I've spent a little time using OpenRPG. My 
> background is as an enterprise java architect and developer.  For the 
> last two years, my secondary responsibilty has been doing build and 
> deployment process management.  That's what I'd like to talk about with 
> OpenRPG2.
> 
> The work that's been done so far is very nice.  It seems to be lacking 
> unit testing, as well as integration tests between the client and 
> server, and that's where I think I can help.

I've been doing my own unit testing with stuff I've been doing using 
JUnit, putting stuff in test/, which Netbeans directly supports. 
Although Netbeans is not required to compile or to use openrpg2, it is 
the development platform that has been settled upon by the developers. 
  Netbeans works directly with ant scripts, which is the defacto build 
process for java projects, so it's very good that way.

> I propose a minor structural change to the subversion repository that 
> will enable me to convert OpenRPG2 to a Maven2 project.  If src/openrpg2 
> was moved to src/main/java/openrpg2 it would be possible then to move 
> all the non-java resources into a resource tree.  
Doing that would require that the openrpg2 project be renamed to 
main.java.openrpg2 or else the build system (and in particular the unit 
testing system) that Netbeans uses will not work.

Anyways... just a couple of comments about your OpenRPG2 faq that you 
put up on your website...
"Why is there an OpenRPG2? I thought OpenRPG was just fine..."
The actual answer to this is because OpenRPG was becoming 
unmaintainable.  It was felt that starting over from scratch was best, 
taking what we learned from our experiences with OpenRPG and applying 
that knowledge to the direction we take OpenRPG2.

"Why did you choose to write OpenRPG2 in Java instead of using the 
exiting Python code?"
Well now, you see... that's the problem right there.... "using existing 
code".  We didn't want to use *ANY* existing code... we wanted to take 
what we learned from the experience and code it from scratch.  I realize 
that concept might rub some people the wrong way in this day and age of 
so heavily supporting code reuse, but it's worth noting that copying and 
pasting is actually the WORST method of code reuse that exists.  If 
there were any bugs in the old code, copying and pasting guarantees that 
the bugs will be preserved.   The best method of code reuse is to copy 
design patterns rather than actual code, and there's absolutely no 
reason that could not be done with a from-scratch rewrite anyways.

Now, since the code is being done from scratch, why Java, and why not 
Python?   Well, the simplest reason is that for many of the things we 
would want to do, one would have needed to download other packages 
besides Python and our own project.  For example, OpenRPG1 requires not 
only Python, but also wxPython, which in turn requires wxWindows.  If we 
had done OpenRPG2 in python, these two extra requirements would have 
been present again.  Java has support for these and many other 
capabilities that we desired built right in, so there is nothing more to 
download once you have the program and a current JRE.

 >> Mark