The issue is that I understand C++ and have lots of tools
I've used over the years that would help me clean it up.

Thanks anyway.

       Gerry Murphy

Does the code at least work?

If it works, likely you best bet is to get someone more familiar with
Java to document and clean it up for you. Then is suddenly may seem
more comprehensible.  (Hint, I do this sort of thing on a contract
basis.).  You need quite different sorts of docs for newbies and for
experienced programmers.

I got in to heck of a fight with a guy on a team once because he was
FURIOUS with me for documenting every method and parameter with
JavaDoc no matter how obvious it was.  He prided himself on terse
code, and my JavaDoc blew up his line counts.

If the program seriously does not work, your best bet if you have to
maintain this, is just to extract a spec from the working program and
from crucial bits of the code, and redo it in the C++ you are familiar
with.

The docs most often missing are the "forest" docs.  It is easy to
figure out how a method works, but much harder to see what it is FOR,
and how it fits into the big picture.

The most important docs are the "most obvious" docs to the coder --
what a class is FOR.  To him the details are the complicated things.
To someone coming cold, details are easy to figure out. What's hard is
how the whole thing fits together. What is the overall flow.

In cleanup, you just whittle away, working on the most comprehensible
bits.  It is a bit like a crossword puzzle.  Every part you figure out
makes some more part clear.

You refactor and clean up code. This makes new levels of meaning shine
through.

I was going to ask some probing questions, but you've already been
candid in your replies. Would it be fair to suggest that the
situation is something like this?
- you don't have a lot of Java experience
- you've "inherited" a project which is a "rats nest"
- you'd like to convert the code to a language with which you're
  more familiar
- you're facing unrealistic expectations and pressure from your
  management

Welcome to the real world! Sorry if that doesn't sound particularly
supportive but it's a fair comment. I well recall the times I was
"dropped into it", typically at the 11th hour.
So look upon this as a personal and professional challenge! You'll
have a tough sell in the expectation management area but you seem
to already accept one of the possible outcomes (getting axed).
You're also heading in the right direction by trying to import the
project into an IDE. Try to provide concrete numbers to management
on a daily basis, something along the lines of "I've now got 60%
of the code imported and syntactically correct".
I don't know Netbeans but some people here swear by Eclipse,
particularly for refactoring code. I'm sure that there are also
tools available which can analyze the existing code for linkages
and dependencies but, having never had to do this kind of job
myself, will defer to the recommendations of others.
Just keep trying to move forward and explain that even the "best
of the best" wouldn't fare well faced with atrocious code.
Keep the chin up, try not to dump on the original author, and
maintain your integrity. That, as much as your programming prowess,
will help you through the most trying of times.

I did mention it in a reply to Roedy Green,
you might also have remembered that you
yourself mentioned it in comp.lang.java.help.
Perhaps you forgot because you were too busy
with gratuitous insults.  I think I'd be happier
if you didn't respond to my posts in future.

Gerry,

Here's my opinion on the matter, for what it's worth.

First of all, while Thomas wrote one of the more insulting replies in
this thread, he also managed to be exactly right about at least one
thing.  So I quote:

Thomas Weidenfeller wrote:

This is a very reasonable explanation of what you can expect from a
conversion tool.  If you were familiar with a language that exhibits
wildly different syntax, I could see translating just so you're more
comfortable with the resulting code.  Java, though, is almost identical
to C++ regarding its procedural language features and general syntax.  
The only major things that differ are exactly those things that you will
not be able to translate in an automated way.

I expect if you've really got a bunch of poor code, that it's mostly
poor in how it interacts with the core library or other third-party
APIs.  You're absolutely not going to be able to automate a conversion
from a Swing-based application to an MFC application with Visual C++.  
The means of performing common tasks are just so different from each
other that this would be better done as a translation by hand.

If I were you and had a project of this size, I'd start learning Java
and try to improve as you go.  Write unit tests.  Use automatic
refactoring support.  Make changes that you think should still work and
then repeat your unit tests to verify that they do.  If you're
experienced with C++, you should have a fairly good idea what
constitutes good design in an OO environment, so you are qualified to do
this.  The change across languages, though, just introduces more work
and more cleaning up to get done.

And, of course, if you have specific questions we're happy to address
them.

Whoops! - so it is, misread that.

--
Tim Ward
Brett Ward Limited - www.brettward.co.uk

Good lord.  It is astounding someone could keep track of a project in
their own head that big without documenting as they went.

Some young hot shot right?