News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 2/1/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Available Today
A Visual Studio 2010 release candidate is available on MSDN.
02/09/2010 09:45 AM EST

Is Microsoft eyeing Office subscription pricing?
Microsoft may be preparing to offer a new Office pricing option called "union," which charges the same for cloud as on-premises.
02/01/2010 09:38 AM EST

Facebook rewrites PHP runtime
Facebook is about to open source its own PHP runtime, written from scratch for speed.
01/30/2010 08:53 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
2/9/2010 to 2/13/2010
San Francisco
IDG World Expo

2/10/2010 to 2/12/2010
San Francisco
BZ Media

2/17/2010 to 2/25/2010
Atlanta
Python Software Foundation

2/19/2010 to 2/20/2010
Los Angeles
SCALE

2/21/2010 to 2/24/2010
Las Vegas
IBM


 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources

jFactor Speeds Code-Improvement Process


Instantiations' refactoring tool helps meet enterprise standards



March 1, 2001 — 
Want to know where developers need help? Why not ask them? That's what IBM did when it assembled a feature-request database for its VisualAge for Java customers. And when Instantiations Inc. looked through that database, one word stood out: refactoring. Their response: jFactor.

"Refactoring was among the top three requests of more than 650 submitted by developers to the database," said Mark Johnson, Instantiations' vice president of marketing and business development. "We looked at it as an opportunity, because our business is predicated on augmenting or building supplements to base software tools from OEMs."

Instantiations built jFactor to offer developers "a disciplined way to clean up their code for better maintainability, reliability and reusability without changing the behavior of the existing software program," Johnson said, adding that the impetus for jFactor was to improve the code design after the program was written.

"Developers aren't normally thinking about reuse or proper design when they are in the editor writing down their ideas of how to make a program function," Johnson said. Refactoring, or incrementally improving functional code, comes into play only after programmers have written and tested the code and determine if its structure is reliable, maintainable and reusable.

Johnson said jFactor (www.instantiations.com/jfactor) includes four categories for strengthening code structures: method refactorings, field refactorings, class refactorings and package refactorings. Within each of the categories are more specific techniques, he said. For example, one extract method permits the developer to take a code fragment from a chunk of code, move it into a new chunk and then create a call from the old chunk into the fragment in the new chunk of code.

He said that developers using the automated tools could cut refactoring and code improvement down to about 15 minutes from literally hours, helping to more easily and efficiently comply with corporate standards and naming conventions. "Otherwise," he said, "developers would have to follow a sequence of refactoring manually, discouraging them from doing it at all."

He added that the refactoring tool would also help managers accelerate products to market because it takes less time to refactor code.

Instantiations also released Version 2.0 of Visual Age Assist Enterprise/J for Visual Age for Java (www.instantiations.com/assist), which is claimed to offer enhancements in source code editing, method bookmarking, intrarepository broadcast messaging and global task automation.

jFactor for Visual Age for Java and Visual Age Assist Enterprise/J for Visual Age for Java are each $895, and are available immediately.


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/25569
 

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading