refactoring tools

Yes we have plans, but not part of 11.0.

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Sent from phone.

Do you have plans to share the plans so that we could help to prioritize?

And have you at least looked at Prorefactor to see what has already been done?

Hi Mike et al.

As Phani said, providing refactoring tools is on the OEA roadmap but is currently not actively being worked on. When we have a plan for refactoring support, we will definitely share it with you all and get your input. Thanks

Regards,

Sunil.

May I be so bold to state that I haven't at least looked at it doctor, while I even knew it was there. :-) It's a retired project (see http://www.oehive.org/prorefactor/). Moreover I would like to see refactoringtools maintained by PSC, not by some volunteers.

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Kind regards,

Stefan Houtzager

Houtzager ICT consultancy & development

www.linkedin.com/in/stefanhoutzager

It's being retired doesn't mean that it can't help show the path to a PSC effort.

It isn't retired because it doesn't work or is no longer relevant, but because there is an evolutionary relationship between Proparse, ProRefactor, and the engine in Analyst.  The new Proparse engine which grew out of this process took over much of what set ProRefactor apart from the original Proparse other than the actual refactoring tools.  I.e., were one to continue work on refactoring, one would want to use that engine in place of the one actually in ProRefactor.

To me, the big limitation of ProRefactor was always that one needed to write new refactorings in Java.  That was good for performance, but was a real barrier to adoption.  ProLint has been much more widely adopted exactly because people can customize the rules themselves in ABL.  I think this is an important lesson which we need to bear in mind whether the work is done by PSC or by someone else.  I.e., refactoring is of limited use unless it can be extended and the more easily it can be extended, the more widely it will be used and the more good it will do.

Given that we know we won't get anything from PSC until at least 2012, if then, and there is a good chance that the initial release(s) will be limited ... just because it would take a lot of resources for it to be anything else ... I would think that anyone who was genuinely interested in refactoring should be perfectly happy to have it become available from another source.

Also, there is a question of how much one can expect from a refactoring tool.  The sort of things ProRefactor tackled and which would be likely targets for an initial PSC effort are limited ... field and table renaming, forcing changes to ProLint type rules, maybe method extraction and the like.  What most ABL applications need is a more serious level of refactoring, like turning shared variables into parameters, separating UI from BL, etc.  I don't expect that sort of thing is even a twinkle in the eye of the OEA folks.  But, it is a twinkle in mine .... http://www.cintegrity.com/content/Request-Expression-Interest

Of course reinventing the wheel is not sensible. For common OO refactorings the art of spying should be exercised by PSC, but that is obvious and common practice already there. For VB f.e. you have http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb693327.aspx.

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Kind regards,

Stefan Houtzager

Houtzager ICT consultancy & development

www.linkedin.com/in/stefanhoutzager