Sweet Home 3D Forum - Print Post -

Posted by Gforce85 at Mar 25, 2012, 1:24:03 PM

Re: How to join the developer team?

I think it's one of the best way to learn how the program works without entering in the details of its architecture, nothing more.

Yeah I agree that I should first make a plugin to learn how to use the code.

Even if many people contributed to translations, 3D models, documentation and plug-ins, I'm still the only Java developer working on the code of Sweet Home 3D. Thus, I never really thought about the prerequisites required for developers to join the project.

Oke so you are the only person working on this project. Maybe I should look for another project then because I'm also interested in how the work is divided between the developers and how code of different developers is united in the program itself.

But why did you choose to not sell this product commercially and keep the source code for yourself? I think the quality is good enough to earn money with it.

The minimum would probably be to:
- have a real identity (the first name: 076 and last name: 0475 of your profile is definitively not ok wink

My real name is Roland ( I'm from the Netherlands ) and I'm studying Software engineering on an university of applied science.

- accept that I can refuse some code because of its poor quality, or because the feature it brings don't match the purpose of Sweet Home 3D

Oke I understand.

- accept to transfer the rights on your contribution to me. As I sell also a few licenses of Sweet Home 3D to companies that want to create derived versions distributed under a proprietary license, you'll understand that managing copyrights retribution would become too complicated if I had to grant a part of the license price to contributor

So you have a copyright on this product? But when it is open source anybody has the right to sell licenses of this project to interested companies I suppose? When I compile the source code I can basically sell it to everyone interested int it and willingly to pay for it or not?

namespace isn't really a word used in the Java world, but it's not a problem. Sweet Home 3D uses a 3 layers design along with a MVC design:
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.model package for the business layer
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.io package for the persistence layer
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.viewcontroller, com.eteks.sweethome3d.swing and com.eteks.sweethome3d.j3d packages for the View-Controller presentation layer
- com.eteks.sweethome3d package for the assembly of the application version
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.applet package for the assembly of the applet version
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.plugin package to manage plug-ins
- com.eteks.sweethome3d.tools package for a few common non graphic tools.

The most important thing to understand is there's no two way dependency among the packages, to fight against Spaghetti code, something checked by the PackageDependenciesTest JUnit test.

Oke that seems like clear code then. But did you also use certain design patterns?

As of today, the program counts 67100 lines of source code + 5300 lines of test code (counting only lines of real code). This is not huge but not so small too. wink
The big chance of this program is that it was first a study case of a French book about Java / Swing I wrote in 2006, so I took great care to make its architecture and its code as clear as possible for readers, and kept the same direction since that time (even if I had to adjust a few things time after time).

Oke 67100 lines seems manageable, but close to the maximum of what 1 person can comprehend. Or am I wrong?

The books seems very interesting. Is there an English version of it? (I'm dutch, and I can read French a bit but not good enough).