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Getting a clue at / debug a huge Java Swing App I’ve inherited
I joined a new project and have to understand the project’s product. I am more familiar with daemon/standalone type applications but this time i have to get involved in Java GUI applications using Swing.
I have to familiarise myself with quite a large code base. I have been trying to do this for the last 3 days and find that i am struggling to get the “Big picture”. The event driven model means that things can happen and are triggered from anywhere within the application.
At the moment i am still struggling to work out how the screen is built and put together. I can see the code but just struggling to follow because it is not the usual model that i am used to where you can just follow the references, calls etc.
Is there anything i can do to simplify/speed this learning process? I tend to understand things better when i see them in a diagrammatic form (class diagrams, sequence diagrams etc.). I am trying to see if i can try and find a tool that can reverse engineer the code to UML so that i can get a better understanding but because the code base is huge, the UML diagrams that will be generated will probably be unusable because of the number of classes involved.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Guess you are dealing with a legacy application and all the bagage that comes along with it.
So even if you got to generate a UML, I am willing to bet that it will not help you, since you will (most likely) find it to be a giant mess. Things that used to resemble a Design Pattern got messed up, code snippets copied and pasted from a to b to c, etc…
Your best bet (from my experience) is to follow the Programm logic in the debugger when you execute certain actions. At least thats what I found to be most useful when faced with similar senarios.