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Moving a Development Team from C++ to Java?
Nicros asks: "I work for a company that is working toward an FDA approved software development process. We have always used C++ in a Windows environment, and we have more than 6 years of code, applications and libraries developed. Because of our long and convoluted software development history, our existing architecture is difficult to manage for a group of our relatively small size (5 FTEs), and development times are rather slow. Our IT director has made the decision that, to speed up development times, we need to re-architect all of our existing code, from C++ to Java." What would be the best way to go about handling such a migration? In a general sense, how would you go about moving a development team from one language to another?
"Our IT director has hired a 3rd party (offshore) company assist us with this migration, and they have recommended that we change from C++ to Java, Spring and Hibernate. We are all professional programmers here, so learning Java is not a problem for those of us who don't know it. The real question is: what do we gain from moving to Java? Or conversely: what do we lose by moving away from C++? Additionally, will one language or another really help us to get FDA approval?
I personally am a bit suspicious of this solution. I find it more likely that the problems we have would persist across languages or architectures (lack of time and resources leading to buggy code, lack of direction from marketing, and so on). However, having not gone through this process before, I would be interested to hear any thoughts, stories of similar experiences, or pros and cons."
I personally am a bit suspicious of this solution. I find it more likely that the problems we have would persist across languages or architectures (lack of time and resources leading to buggy code, lack of direction from marketing, and so on). However, having not gone through this process before, I would be interested to hear any thoughts, stories of similar experiences, or pros and cons."
Agreed. You might see benefits if you start using a language that interfaces well with C++, though--perhaps Python? That would allow you to keep your existing work and continue using C++ while exploring more platform-independent and possibly quicker systems for development.
Switching suddenly to Java, though, is a bad idea if you don't already have the expertise.
My professional advice would be to stick with what you've got. If it's 6 years worth of C++ code, it's probably going to take roughly that amount of time to get to the same place with Java.
It'll be slightly quicker because you already know what you have to duplicate, but more than likely you will go through the same bugs and teething problems that were already solved years ago all over again.
If you get this offshore company to redevelop in Java, they are going to hand you a pile of code which you don't understand (because you're all used to C++), and don't have any stake in. Your developers are going to be less interested in fixing other people's bugs than their own (that's my experience anyway).
I think you'd be better off spending the money to hire some local contractors to cut down your codebase. Keep the language and functionality the same, but any project which has grown over 6 years is going to have crud that can be removed or rewritten. Spend your time imroving what you've got rather than starting again.
Also my experience of one offshore dev company was that they cut & pasted some open source (GPL) code, changed a few lines then tried to charge me for 3 months of development work.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
"Things you should never do, Part 1": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 69.html
Six years of C++ development, and all the corresponding skill development. ... That's a shitload of stuff to just throw away to be buzzword compliant. ... The key word is incremental. Incremental might succeed.
.net forms) or be as much work as a re-write.
Let me be the lone voice to call bullshit. Story poster is obviously inexperienced and trying to be diplomatic (if for no other reason than pride). What we have here is almost certainly a big steaming pile of crap.
Their development has slowed to the point where they are going to ditch the whole thing. It's too late to save this code. Putting a nice interface on it will just exacerbate the problem because anything you try to do will either expose the underlying crap and bugs (ie mfc,
Just take a look at Windows for an example of what happens when you try to incrementally evolve something like this: 6 years with basically no innovation because updating anything is so slow and difficult. Meanwhile both Apple and Linux have made leaps and bounds, Apple by ditching their massive investment in OS 9 and Linux by shunning backwards compatibility. Linux doesn't have binary kernel drivers because mapping better stuff to old mistakes is even harder than keeping a zillion drivers up-to-date. I'm always getting "kernel too old" messages trying to make binaries that run everywhere. It sucks, but imho it's a huge reason why Linux is advancing instead of stagnating. The only reason Microsoft is still around is because of lock-in; if poster's company doesn't have a lock on the market and given their codebase they will fail if taking the incremental approach.
I think it's painfully obvious that whatever it is they are doing (I'm guessing some database + COBRA junk) is something that shouldn't be written in C++ in the first place. For example, poster does not mention performance at all. C++ *can* be a lot faster than Java at some things and is a pretty good choice for those (action games for instance), but if you are not even slightly concerned about it then that's a pretty big tell that using C++ for it is a huge mistake. Ideally they would write most of their code in Python or Ruby or similar, but it sounds like this could be out because of client issues. So Java or C# is probably the only realistic language to code in.