RE: [Rssview-developers] New package structure [RFC]

[Christoph W. <chr...@we...>]

Hi,

Be prepared this mail is quite extensive!

Martin wrote:
> I also noticed that we have dead sources, so we should
> mark them as dead or remove them directly from the
> repository.

Kick bad source whenever encountered. We've CVS let's consult the attic =
if
we deleted anything useful.

> I have made some work to determine where a piece of
> source belongs, but it's not a final decision at
> all. I don't want to separate the sources according
> to MVC (model-view-controller), because it will be
> difficult to follow the processes which a user
> walks along and which we need to keep together to
> work efficiently.
> The MVC structure below exists ONLY to make some
> helping subcategories.

Creating packages accoring to MVC structure is evil and leads to a =
couple of
circular references (Controller, View as example), no self contained
packages etc...

> I await your comments, before I go ahead.

Here it is!

First I refactored subscriptions to channels so let's use the term =
channel
for both a subscription and an rss feed channel. In case this separation =
is
no longer present in code. Only one interface "Channel" exists.


Let's first start from our "entity" interaces that build the gantry of
RssView:
* Node=20
 - new interface to better manage Channel an RssGroupNodes in our model
* CategoryNode=20
 - derived from Node - represents a Node with children in our model
* Channel
* Article

Let's augment this list by all classes that are directly used by these
interfaces:

Channel:
* ChannelListener
* ChannelHeader
* Query

If we could extract these classes to a package for example "core" and =
add
the classes that implement
Node, CategoryNode , Channel and Article interfaces we get a perfect
package.

Imho we should not try to move our Listener/Event/EventSupport classes =
to
this package but give them a seperate "sub-packages" named event.

We should not move any "reusable" UI Classes to specific packages. =
Example:
> - channel tree
> ./src/de/cinek/rssview/ui/DnDSupportTree.java

We could instead create a package for these self contained Classes named
"widgets" or something similar. We use these classes like we would use =
some
third party component they don't depend on the rest of rssview. This is
especially true for Sortable Table components.

Well suitable canidats for this package are also:
> ./src/de/cinek/rssview/RssSplashScreen.java
> ./src/de/cinek/rssview/images/IconContainer.java
> ./src/de/cinek/rssview/RssInfoDialog.java
> ./src/de/cinek/rssview/ui/HighlightFilter.java

Rename the "io" package to dataaccess.

Move ampheta desk connectors to
connectivity package and Ampheta Desk related events to
connectivity.event package

Now a proposal for the great package refactoring:
Let's take some smaller steps to a better package structure. After every
step let's test our refactoring using some metric toolkits like jdepend =
to
be sure that we're making things better not worse...

My proposed package structure (de.cinek.rssview omitted):

event
dataaccess
core
widgets
widgets.table
widgets.dragdrop (perhaps if we find enough classes)
connectivity
connectivity.event

Cheers
Christoph

PS: This mail was written using Outlook. All package names ment to be in
lower case! Even if Outlook does not mean that.