what refactoring tools do you use? introduce some to me thanks. I heard of slickedit is good.

To be honest, the best refactoring tool I know of is a pencil, some extra paper, your design document, and if at all possible, a printed copy of each object/function (depending on what language you're programming in, this may/may not be possible. also, if you're talking millions of lines of code, an overhead projector and a computer might be a bit more straight forward an option).

To begin, you need input. Listen to your developers (yourself); what is the most convoluted part of your code? Where are things absolutely slow? Where are the most bugs located in your code?

By simply writing these down, you can get a feel of what objects and functions you need to look at. Some people really look down on this method (Some people call it "Design By Committee", because they feel that the people actually developing the code don't really have any true outcome of this, and sometimes this is true of larger organizations, but mine's really good about it).

Really, I haven't yet seen a tool (including some internally generated by my company for the process) that genuinely make an impact on how quickly our refactoring takes place, nor the quality of the outcome. Simply looking at the code from a different angle is about the best way I know of.

I think by refactoring tool he means something to automatically move methods and change names once you figure out how you're redesigning. And I perosnally am in the process of writing one so I use it... Not free to the public yet though.

Smalltalk seems to have good refactoring support. I need to get my head around the freakin' IDEs though 0_o;

While there are some few commercial refactoring tools available for C++ (usually with extremely limited functionality), there are unfortunately not any free/open source refactoring tools available that I am aware of.

However, I recently stumbled across a new sourceforge project called "Carl: Code Analysis and Refactoring Library".
Apparently, they started the SF project just recently, so they do not yet have any files released, however the project itself seems to be a spin off from KDevelop (the de facto IDE for KDE) and based on the discussion that spawned the project, these folks seem to be pretty ambitious and do not want to limit their project to Linux/KDE.
Rather they hope to create ultimately a cross-platform tool that is supposed to also become IDE-independent.

So while they currently just seem to be in the planning stage, I would expect them to appreciate any volunteer offers, especially from skilled coders with a strong interest in refactoring, i.e. make sure to contact them if you are interested in refactoring in general, and might possibly be interested in contributing to a unique open source project in particular. Time permitting, I do also hope to contribute to this project eventually. As a strong proponent of open source software, I think it would be particularly cool if there was such an important open source project without any equally capable commercial alternative.

HTH

Gary

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
While there are some few commercial refactoring tools available for C++ (usually with extremely limited functionality), there are unfortunately not any free/open source refactoring tools available that I am aware of.

However, I recently stumbled across a new sourceforge project called "Carl: Code Analysis and Refactoring Library".
Apparently, they started the SF project just recently, so they do not yet have any files released, however the project itself seems to be a spin off from KDevelop (the de facto IDE for KDE) and based on the discussion that spawned the project, these folks seem to be pretty ambitious and do not want to limit their project to Linux/KDE.
Rather they hope to create ultimately a cross-platform tool that is supposed to also become IDE-independent.

So while they currently just seem to be in the planning stage, I would expect them to appreciate any volunteer offers, especially from skilled coders with a strong interest in refactoring, i.e. make sure to contact them if you are interested in refactoring in general, and might possibly be interested in contributing to a unique open source project in particular. Time permitting, I do also hope to contribute to this project eventually. As a strong proponent of open source software, I think it would be particularly cool if there was such an important open source project without any equally capable commercial alternative.

HTH

Gary

Sorry, forgot the link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/carl

Gary

Quote:Original post by luasitdown
what refactoring tools do you use?

introduce some to me thanks.

The aforementioned open source project has a pretty extensive resource section, including a listing of commercial products that feature more or less refactoring-related capabilities:

http://carl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Resources#Related_commercial_products