Frockle/PeerReview2

Introduction

This exercise is similar to ../PeerReview, however rather than a physical meeting we will be conducting a tele-conference on 13th June 2007. It is a triangular round-robin where each team reviews the work of another, within a triplet. We are reviewing the work of [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_framework/demo_designshare.html DesignShare]. In turn, we are being reviewed by [http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/projects/resourcebrowser/ ResourceBrowser].

General Observations

Whilst the peer-review exercise entails reviewing one project in particular, there were a few general points I thought were worth making when I was bookmarking sites the other day.

Blogs

If the institution hosts a blogging service then it is great to use this, as you (often) get the benefit of institutional branding.
It is easy to create a blog using a third-party hosting service, see [https://www2.blogger.com/start Blogger], [http://wordpress.com/ Wordpress], [http://www.typepad.com/ Typepad], etc. Many support the notion of having more than one author (e.g. [https://www2.blogger.com/start Blogger]).
Having an RSS feed from your blog is a great feature to enable interested parties to keep up with your posts. Again, by using a well-known blogging service (see above point) you will almost undoubtedly get this for free.

Main Exercise: DesignShare (conducted on April 24th 2007)

Pluses

Good project [http://designshare.opendocument.net/Application/index.php?crumb=2&action=page&page=About+DesignShare web-site] which provides a nice introduction.
Sensible code formatting and comments.
Being built as an Eclipse plugin, so effectively a standard build procedure (no scripts required) and then just Run As -> Eclipse Application to execute it.
Software works "out-of-the-box"! Compiles and runs from a CVS check-out. It is true that this reviewer [AO'C] has had some familiarity with building [http://www.reload.ac.uk Reload] before (for which this project is a plug-in) and a superficial understanding of Eclipse plugins, but it goes to show that if you write against a standard framework ([http://www.reload.ac.uk/ Reload] / [http://eclipse.org/ Eclipse]) you can "get away" without having any documentation .

Minuses

Could not find a project blog.
All the CVS commit messages are blank - helpful to have a bit more information, even if it's just "Added a bit more code ..." .
License is probably in the wrong place - should probably be placed at the top of the file above the package declaration.
A lot of object-oriented GUI programming involves subclassing and overriding of (callback) methods. Therefore, as the javadoc tool copies entries for overridden methods from the superclass, it is not necessary to document these methods (unless they deliberately deviate from the expected behaviour !). Or, put another way, document the private methods which these callback methods call / do the actual work.