Moving from JDK 1.2 to JDK 1.5 not knowing it was supposed to be JDK 1.4.2 is not cool at all. Amongst the headaches, I learned something about generics in JDK 1.5 that may pose a problem to code migration.
To add to the headaches, I ran into some TheDailyWTF code-worthy pieces in the application. It’s a 1300 line class that contains a 1000 line method. This method contains about 30 code blocks, all of which are duplicated. AWESOME.
I hope I’ll be able to refactor all this nonsense after the migration. The application is not really all that complicated, but the code…well…it speaks for itself.
As for the silver lining, I’m learning a lot about Ant, Tomcat, all the different Java acronyms (JDK, J2EE, JAR, EJB, EAR, WAR, etc.), and coding best practices.
-Empty catch statements are bad.
-Not logging errors to a file makes it really hard to debug, especially when it’s not setup to run/debug on an IDE!
-Following coding standards really does help developers read code better.
On another note, everyone should go watch Lucky Number Slevin.
ure sick.