Thread: Hello from the middle of a decade's worth of legacy code...

I am at this point the last most experienced Java programmer dealing with enhancements to a Java GUI wrapped around a legacy C/C++ app...which is to say, distinctly short on local help, when my own relatively modest skills aren't enough to sort out why the wretched thing doesn't behave, or doesn't work consistently. It doesn't help, that the GUI of which I now have custody has been developed by a variety of people over the past 10-12 years, each with their own unique approach to programming Java (read, all sorts of inconsistent approaches), and most of them apparently in the process of learning it on the job.

I can only hope not to frustrate people too much, as I flounder around trying to figure out what my options are for dealing with the beast.

I could wish I had that freedom, but no...our system restricts me to making only the smallest changes necessary to implement any fix or enhancement, and I'm code-reviewed on that. And Java 7? Oh, heck. This thing's been written in everything from Java 1.2 through (mostly) Java 1.4, through (now) Java 6, which I and my last team lead were able to get pushed in a year or two back, only once we hit an enhancement nothing less would allow us to push through.

Welcome, and we'll help if we can, but I doubt those who help here will be sensitive to your company's rules, and are not keen to show you how to do what we might consider to be the "wrong" thing. But, we'll do our best.

No problem. I don't expect anyone to countenance insanity (I'm the only one getting paid to do) and have no great hopes that anyone may be able to do more than occasionally point me in the direction of possible additional things to search/study.