Latest "Tidied" WCKER Version
=============================

The version of WCKER just checked in ( 12/02/05 ) has been tidied-up
and comments have been added at the request of Dave B. Hopefully, this
should make things easier for multi-person development. If you feel
any particular bit of additional tidying/commenting would be helpful
then let mw know.

In fact I've taken the opportunity to object-orient (OO) the code a bit
more ... which is a natural way of tidying things up in Java.
As I mentioned to Tjitske there is a good argument for saying that OO
is a process rather than a state.

OO Activities
============

OO tidying mechanisms include:

	* making static code non-static
		
		basically instead of there being just
		one permanent instance of code (i.e. static code)
		it is automatically associated with
		a dynamically created object instance (and
		thereby has access to data items related to
		that specific object).

		A "naive" but "revealing" way of restating this is
		to say that OO code can reduce the number of explicit
		parameters used.
		
	* introducing inheritance

		our WckerCache class is a natural extension of
		Java's LinkedList class so I inserted explicit inheritance.
		The effect was a beneficial simplification of the code.

		Unfortunately many of the SWT classes are designated as
		final, which bars them from being inherited from. 
		Security arguments are involved ... but non-final classes
		would have allowed me to object-orient WCKER much more.

Javadoc
=======

I have been commenting using the "javadoc" conventions where appropriate.
javadoc is a tool which extracts documentation from java source comments.

I have a little script "javadoc.run" which will generate the javadoc documentation
for WCKER under Linux. This is in the "ant" directory. It would be worthwhile
having a Windows equivalent, if this does not exist at present.

Following the overall project philosophy, the javadoc documentation should
really be generated by "ant" so this is something we might want to look into.

The problem with "ant" is that there is always a double learning curve: one
first has to learn how to use a tool (such as javadoc); one then has to learn
the appropriate XML tags to use within an ant file to capture the same actions!

A brief net surf did NOT reveal what these tags might be for javadoc (if they
indeed exist). Of course one could try to go native with javadoc within ant
i.e. use system-level calls in the way one does in a makefile.