Smelly Code
Phoebe in that TV-show called Friends could have written a song about smelly computer code.
At its best it can smell like flowers. But a bunch of code does not smell remotely like flowers. At all. Most of it stink.
I have browsed around the web looking for some not-so-nice-looking code. I didn’t have to look that hard. It fell into my lap.
The Daily Dosage
A daily dosage of it can be had over at the popular site The daily WTF.
Some good ones:
File Processing the Hard Way
The snippet below looks effective.
Looks like Visual Basic, but it’s hard to say, as it hurts a little too much to look at it for more than a millisecond. But then, if you buy some expensive hard drives, why not making them work for the money.
s
Private Sub ProcessFile()
' prepare to do stuff ...
Do Until blnLastTime = True
Set fileReader = fso.OpenTextFile(strFileName)
If fileReader.AtEndOfStream = True Then
blnLastTime = True
Else
strTextLine = fileReader.ReadLine
End If
' actually do stuff
fileReader.Close
Delete_Line (strFileName)
Loop
fileReader.Close
End Sub
Private Sub Delete_Line(strFile)
Set fileReader = fso.OpenTextFile(strFile)
If fso.FileExists(strFile & "2") Then
fso.DeleteFile (strFile & "2")
End If
Set fileWriter = fso.CreateTextFile(strFile & 2)
If fileReader.AtEndOfStream = False Then
fileReader.ReadLine
End If
If fileReader.AtEndOfStream = False Then
strLine = fileReader.ReadAll
fileWriter.Write (strLine)
End If
fileReader.Close
fileWriter.Close
fso.DeleteFile strFile, True
fso.CopyFile strFile & "2", strFile, True
fso.DeleteFile strFile & 2, True
End Sub
A Shaky Connection Pool
There is lot to say about the class below. It’s an attempt to implement a connection pool of such. Good thing that getNextIndex() is public and that it doesn’t have any side-effects like updating any internal state.
You’re getting a connection, maybe, and it’s most likely connected, but you may have to share it with someone.
public class RoundRobinConnectionContainer {
private static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger( RoundRobinConnectionContainer.class );
private int useNext = 0;
private List<BehaviorEngineConnection> connections =
Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList<BehaviorEngineConnection>());
// Find the index of the next connection to try
public int getNextIndex() {
if (useNext > this.connections.size() - 1) {
useNext = 0;
}
return( this.useNext++ );
}
public void addConnection(BehaviorEngineConnection connection) {
connections.add(connection);
}
public BehaviorEngineConnection getConnectedConnection() {
int size = this.connections.size();
while (size-- > 0) {
BehaviorEngineConnection conn = connections.get(getNextIndex());
if (conn.isConnected()) {
return conn;
}
LOG.error("No connected connection available!");
return null;
}
}
}