I just implemented my first feature in Online Glom after taking over from Ben Konrath. Luckily I could cargo-cult his work, with some help from Eclipse’s code navigation and refactoring. I added a text box for an easy full text search of the current table, to filter the rows shown. For instance, you can filter the list of packages here.

I’m proud of myself, but I can’t help feeling that it needed far too many code changes, in far too many interconnected classes, just to add a text box in the browser and then use the resulting text to slightly change a method call on the server. I took the time to write a detailed ChangeLog/commit-message just to be sure that I understood what was happening.

This is apparently how things are in the land of Java. In its defence, there are reasons for the abstractions and separations. For instance, OnlineGlom code does the GWT thing of allowing for different View implementations for different clients, such as mobile or desktop, but it only has one type of Views for now. It also uses a Model/View/Presenter architecture, via its Activities, which makes it possible to test more code logic without getting the UI involved. And there’s the Places idea, which maps history tokens (parts of URLs) to Activities and vice-versa.

I wish there were some way to have the useful architecture without the repetitive code that gets in the way of the interesting stuff.