UML & Project Plan

[Clay Atkins <ca...@spcmg.com>]

Is there any UML or other type of documenation describing the system?

Is there a plan, or maybe priority list, for the project?

I would like to work on performance issues, but that might not be what the
project needs right now.

Re: UML & Project Plan

[James Tauber <jt...@jtauber.com>]

> Is there any UML or other type of documenation describing the system?

No. I'd like to produce one. The Javadocs for some packages are good. Others
are non-existent.

> Is there a plan, or maybe priority list, for the project?

My own plan / strategy when I was solo was:

* implement what people ask for first
* even a minimal implementation of a FO is better than no implementation at
all (largely because bug reports are far more informative when the code is
partially working)
* get the thing working first, but continually go back and clean up the code
* clean, extensible, module code is more important than speed at this stage

> I would like to work on performance issues, but that might not be what the
> project needs right now.

At this stage, I think performance can be worked on as long as it is not at
the expense of clear code. For example, it would be great if you could
profile the code and point out alternative approaches at the bottlenecks.

I did this a little bit a while ago and got an 80% speed increase just by
fixing things that I had done stupidly (mostly using StringBuffer instead of
String!)

James