The Daily WTF Java Code …
I am assisting a team out of Vegas with an online gaming site. I was tasked with the analysis of a popular online game and asked to produce a high-level analysis document, including an estimate of effort to reproduce the game.
Okay, let's do it. I downloaded the client software and immediately noticed it required the Java runtime. Hmmmm, Java code my favorite (NOT) programming language. The installation copied the Java class files to the file system, so it was time to inspect her gadget!
Being a resourceful person and *cough* hacker, I invoked the handy-dandy Java decompiler and proceeded to decompile the game! I now have the Java source code to the game, but am a bit surprised the code is a huge pile of spaghetti.
Now that I think about it, I am not as surprised as I thought I was seeing the code. I guess I was expecting to see some great Java considering the game is driving a large gaming site. If the UI looks great, who cares about the crappy software design?
July 24th, 2008 - 08:25
Well at the end of the day there are only two things that matter. First is the end result of the product. It doesn’t matter what your code looks like as long as the final product works as expected. Secondly, is the ability to quickly turn around fixes and improvements. And that’s where all the good code comes into play. All the methodology stuff that we try and follow and all the abstracted code that we try to write is all written in order to maintain the system easily.
September 19th, 2008 - 01:07
The code may have been obfuscated. But with the monkeys developing these days I really wouldn’t be suprised if that is how he/she wrote it.