I miss the automated refactorings in Eclipse. While I am sure that other languages will catch up eventually, for now, I find myself refactoring manually. Here is an example of how I did an “Extract Method” refactoring in Javascript.
This is my first attempt at a tutorial for extending the WebUI in FreeIPA. I’m going to show how to build a new section of the WebUI.
Refactoring is the process of changing the internal structure of a program without changing its functionality. Java programmers have come to depend on automated refactoring support in the IDE. Other languages are not so well represented. Untyped languages do not lend themselves to automated refactorings so easily. Javascript is one such language. However, Javascript’s variable scoping rules make at least one refactoring pretty easy: extract function.
FreeIPA has a set of fixture files: Files that provide static data captured from an RPC that are used for development and unit tests. Here’s how I update them.
I’m an object oriented kind of developer. I likes a strong domain model, a clear separation of responsibility, and all of the goodness that makes code clean. Why, then, am I so resistant to introducing a domain model into the FreeIPA WebUI?
Instead of using Google Windowing Toolkit, Rich Faces, Django, or any other server side technology to perform build the user interface, we should use Javascript and a client side library like JQuery.