My opinion may be biased because I'm a very slow guy and maybe too
perfectionist, but maybe the geotools stability problem is caused at least
partially by code commited too fast without suffisient effort for making it
future proof. Example:
org.geotools.geometry.jts.ReferencedEnvelope
--------------------------------------------
I noticed today that a bunch of new methods were added 2 months and half ago. My
observations:
* The new methods have no javadoc at all. Please, remember to write
javadoc at least for every public API, with a @since 2.4 javadoc tag.
* Those new methods violate the contract of the interface they
implement. The BoundingBox contract said "minX: This is a helper
method for getMinimum getMinimum(i) where i is the ordinate used
to represent easting", but the minX() implementation invoke JTS's
getMinX() method inconditionnaly without any regards to the
underlying CoordinateReferenceSystem axis.
I'm in the process of adding javadoc for those new methods, with a @todo tag
saying that we may have a contract violation problem there. In the future, we
will need to either change the contract, or change the implementation. The later
may be the kind of compatibility break that hurt Geotools.
(actually in this particular case I believe that the implementation is correct
and the contract need to be changed, but this is an other topic).
Maybe we should push for more discipline with the following:
* Take more time in order to think very hard: "is my implementation doing
the right thing"? Thinking harder take more time, but it may have the
interresting side effect of letting more time for other developers to
review code.
* Javadoc always. It take time but may have the interresting side effect
of letting more time for other developers to review code.
* If we don't have the time to implement an API fully right from the
begining, this is okay but check if the conditions are meet (e.g.
in the above 'minX' method, if we don't have the time to implement
a search method for the right axis, thrown an exception if the first
axis direction is not NORTH). It take time but may have (... etc ...).
Martin
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