help using intellij

[Vydha Sridevi]

Hi,
I have a source code and i was told to understand the code of that web applicaiton (contains all kinds of files likes servlets, jsps, xml etc) using IntelliJ IDEA. Somebody please provide me any video tutorials links to understand the source code from the scratch or else guide me through the step by step procedure to be followed.
Please consider this request as very urgent requirement. Thanks in advance.
Sri

[Jay Orsaw]

Vydha Sridevi wrote:Hi,
I have a source code and i was told to understand the code of that web applicaiton (contains all kinds of files likes servlets, jsps, xml etc) using IntelliJ IDEA. Somebody please provide me any video tutorials links to understand the source code from the scratch or else guide me through the step by step procedure to be followed.
Please consider this request as very urgent requirement. Thanks in advance.
Sri

This isn't a site to do work for you, this is a site to learn and communicate equally. The code will be the same on any IDE, so you should learn those things first, before coming here asking people to do the work for you.

[Vydha Sridevi]

Hi Jay,

First of all let me make my point clear, i have no intension to make anyone work for me. Sorry for the misconception. I already started going through few video tutorials regarding the ways to understand the source code but out of curiosity wanted to check with all the technically talented members registered in this website the best tutorials regarding this task if available.
Sorry if my message has hurted anyone.
Thanks,
Sridevi

[Jay Orsaw]

Vydha Sridevi wrote:Hi Jay,

First of all let me make my point clear, i have no intension to make anyone work for me. Sorry for the misconception. I already started going through few video tutorials regarding the ways to understand the source code but out of curiosity wanted to check with all the technically talented members registered in this website the best tutorials regarding this task if available.
Sorry if my message has hurted anyone.
Thanks,
Sridevi

your message isn't hurtful at all, first you should read the FAQ located at the top-center of the page on how to post. Second like anyone here they don't want to do the work for you, so if you have specific questions about XML, Webstart, etc, post the code "you are supposed to learn." and people will help you...

Oracle has an entire "Trail" dedicated to Java learning, check that out.


This is what most members will tell you and I am nicer than a lot of them. No one can help you learn what they have no idea what you are trying to do... I could tell you one thing that makes no sense with what you have. You have to meet us all half way. I ask questions on here all the time, and this is what people expect.

[Peter Johnson]

I recently (within the past month or so) had to learn a complicated web app that others wrote to understand how it worked so that I could take over for someone who went to another project. Here are some of the things I did to get up to speed:

1) I set up the app in a test environment so that I could run it. I made sure that logging was done at debug level. Then I did some thing with the app and noticed what was going on in the log. That gave me some starting points to work with in the sourcecode.

2) I made use of the "call hierarchy" feature in Eclipse. With this feature, starting from any method or field, you can find all of the code that accesses the method or field. Its a great to to find out "how did I get to this code". (I suspect IntelliJ has such a feature, though it might be called something else)

3) I picked up a bug or two (preferably ones that had stack traces) and then attempted to fix those bugs. Then nice thing about a stack trace is that it tells you a lot about how the code is architected and the stack trace is an excellent "call hierarchy". Stack traces are so good for call hierarchies that I often create bogus exceptions just to print their stack traces so that I can find out exactly how the code got to a certain point.

4) I read the design documents (there weren't many) and got an overview from the prior developer.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas about how you might go about understanding your code. Good luck!

[Vydha Sridevi]

Hi Peter,
The points explained in your reply post are the ones for what i was exactly looking for to speed up the knowledge in understanding the already existing source code.
Thank You so much.
Sri

[Tim Holloway]

Hello, Vydha, welcome to the JavaRanch.

The reason you touched a nerve is that a lot of people think that the best way to learn a Java technology is not to use an IDE at all.

We moved your message for an unrelated reason, which was that we prefer to not run several discussions on the same message thread in order to avoid confusion. So we gave you your own thread.

The problem with using an IDE to "learn a technology" is that the IDE does too much of the work for you, and it effectively does it by "magic". People who attempt to learn this way actually tend to form bad habits because they don't know what they're doing or why the IDE is doing what it is doing. I've seen (and created ) some real horrors as a result of that approach.

Unfortunately, a lot of managers have the starry-eyed idea that if they have an Intelligent Design Environment, they can then hire Stupid (and therefore cheap) programmers.

It doesn't work that way. Which is why there's sort of a bitter joke that the best IDE to use to learn a technology is Windows Notepad. When you have to do it all yourself, you learn more. Then once you've learned it, an IDE can help you a lot by doing the stupid jobs for you, but since you already know what it's doing, you'll be in better shape to employ the IDE intelligently.