Re: [RDT-Dev] Re: Refactoring Support for RDT

[Werner S. (murphee) <wer...@gm...>]

Christopher Williams wrote:

>
>
>> Mirko Stocker wrote:
>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> First, I wanted to thank you for the RDT, they are really  great :-) 
>>> Second, my question: I'm a student at the University of  Applied 
>>> Science in Rapperswil, Switzerland. The next semester, we  have to 
>>> do a software-engineering project (about ~200 working  hours), and I 
>>> thought I could (try to) bring refactoring support  to the RDT. But 
>>> I wanted to talk to you guys first, are you  already working at 
>>> this? Do you think it's even doable? What do  you think about it?
>>>

A suggestion: getting any non-trivial refactoring up and running in a 
semester project is not very likely,
but how about building some infrastructure:
Build an abstraction using the RDT project model that can be used to 
facilitate writing refactorings.
Some elements of this would be
  - make it easy to querying the RDT model for information (eg. "give me 
all method definitions", "give me all places where a singleton class is 
created",...)
  - an easy way to apply bulk modifications to many classes
    analysis is one thing, but it should be easy to rename files, types, 
elements, etc. even if these files aren't opened.
  - a higher level DOM (Domain Object Model) that makes it easier to use 
RDT
    (checkout the DASH project and it's ideas at 
http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/dash/  )
  - Here's an overview of how Rename Refactoring in Smalltalk works:
    http://jroller.com/page/murphee?entry=so_that_s_how_dynamic
    One thing that is needed to do something like this for Ruby in 
Eclipse is some way to
    + add wrappers to methods
    + injecting an Agent into the running process that can take 
information from the wrappers and transport it back to Eclipse
    + some Eclipse-side receiver that can map from the events from the 
Ruby-side agent to source locations, etc.

BTW: reading some of the recent Eclipse planning meeting notes, it seems 
like the JDT Refactoring tools
have received "scripting support"; I guess this is a way to construct 
refactorings in a higher level way
or to string several existing refactorings together. I haven't looked at 
what this really does, but maybe
that's something to look into.


murphee
-- 
Blog @ http://jroller.com/page/murphee