Java & Toys

2008-05-12

After a few months of doing python development, which to me still feels like a straight jacket. I had some Java coding to do last week and promptly wasted a few hours checking out the latest toys, being:

  • Eclipse 3.4 M7
  • Hudson
  • Findbugs for Hudson

Eclipse 3.4 M7 is the first milestone I’ve tried for the upcoming Eclipse release. This is due to me not coding Java much lately; nothing wrong with it otherwise. Normally, I’d probably have switched around M4 already (at least did so for 3.2 and 3.3 cycles). In fact it is a great improvement and several nice productivity enhancements are included. My favorite one is the problem hover that now includes links to quick fixes. So instead of point, click, typing ctrl+0, arrow down (1..*), enter, you can now lean back and point & hover + click. Brilliant. I promptly used it to convert some 1.4 non generics based code into nice generics based code simply by tackling all the generics related warnings one by one essentially only touching the keyboard to suggest a few type parameters Eclipse couldn’t figure out. Introduce generic type parameter + infer generics refactorings are very helpful here. The code of course compiled and executed as expected. No bugs introduced and the test suite still runs fine. Around 5000 lines of code refactored in under 20 minutes. I still have some work to do to remove some redundant casts and to replace some while/for loops with foreach.

Other nice features are the new breadcrumps bar (brilliant!) and a new refactoring to create parameter classes for overly long lists of parameters on methods. Also nice is a refactoring to concatenate String concatenation into StringBuffer.append calls. Although StringBuilder is slightly faster for cases where you don’t need thread safe code (i.e most of the time). The rest is the usual amount of major and minor refinements that I care less about but are nice to have around anyway. One I imagine I might end up using a lot is quickfixes to sort out osgi bundle dependencies. You might recall me complaining about this some time ago. Also be sure to read Peter Kriens reply to this btw. Bnd is indeed nice but tools don’t solve what is in my view a kludge. Both the new eclipse feature and BND are workarounds for the problem that what OSGI is trying to do does not exist at  (and is somewhat at odd with) the Java type level.

Anyway, the second thing I looked into was Hudson, a nice server for continuous integration. It can checkout anything from a wide range of version control systems (subversion supported out of the box, several others through plugins) and run any script you like. It also understands maven and how to launch ant. With the right plugins you can then let it do quite useful things like compiling, running static code analyzers, deploying to a staging server, running test suites, etc. Unlike some stuff I evaluated a few years this actually worked right out of the box and was so easy to set up that I promptly did so for the project I’m working on. Together with loads of plugins that add all sorts of cool functionality, you have just ran out of excuses to not do continuous integration.

One of the plugins I’ve installed so far is an old favorite Findbugs which promptly drew my attention to two potentially dangerous bugs and a minor performance bug in my code reminding me that running this and making sure it doesn’t complain is actually quite important. Of all code checkers, findbugs provides the best mix between finding loads of stuff while not being obnoxious about it without a lot of configuration (like e.g. checkstyle and pmd require to shut the fuck up about stupid stuff I don’t care about) and while actually finding stuff that needs fixing.

While of course Java centric, you can teach Hudson other tricks as well.  So, next on my agenda is creating a job for our python code and hooking that up to pylint and possibly our django unit tests. There’s plugins around for both tasks.