08.28.07

idea for programming tool

Posted in Hacking, programmer productivity, Technology trends at 10:36 am by ducky

As I work, I find myself asking a question over and over “how do I get information from point A to point B?”. For example, “How do I get the position of the active editor from EditorSashContainer into TabBehaviourAutoPin?”

It seems like there is probably room for a tool that figures out a path from point A to point B.

This might also make the code more maintainable — instead of me going and making new methods in the chain from A to B through six intermediate methods, maybe the tool can find a path that goes through only two classes.

I can imagine the tool giving me the shortest path through public methods, and (if it exists) the shortest path that requires private variables or methods. Maybe it would find that there is a private variable that, if I made a public getter, I could use.

UPDATE: my supervisor (“advisor” in the US) pointed me at a paper describing a system (Prospector) to do just that. Alas, I haven’t been able to find any code for it. The code is at here, and there is also a web interface (which knows about J2SE 1.4, Eclipse 3.0, and Eclipse GEF source). The plugin also unfortunately seems to be too downrev for me. 🙁

There is also a tool called Strathcona which does something sort of similar — it finds examples of existing code that goes from A to B. I don’t think that would have helped me with the specific things I was looking for, because I don’t think there was any existing code anywhere that did all of what I wanted to do. It might have helped me get from A to C and then from C to A, however.

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