News

2.8 Release Candidates

Mike Atkinson - 2003-10-02 13:12

The 2.8.07 development builds are release candidates, I think there are no major bugs. In a week (Thursday 9th October) I will make them final if no show-stoppers are found.

I may update some of the documentatiion in the meantime, and try and find out why the JBuilder9 plugin does not show up in the JBuilder interface.

The next release (2.9) will mainly be for bug-fixes.

Help Wanted: design patterns analyser/advisor

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-24 09:15

Objective - to be able to detect common design patterns (such as immutable objects, factories, JavaBeans) and classes that nearly obey those patterns (e.g. a class with only one mutator method).

Generate JavaDoc in the pretty-printer for the detected design patterns. Advise on how to transform classes into those that obey the patterns, including the possible refactoring required.

Help Wanted: Common Code Detector

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-24 08:15

The cut and paste detector (inherited from PMD) does a good job of finding cut and pasted sections of code. But it only works if the tokens are exactly the same.

It would be nice to have a Common Code Detector that finds code segments that are similar (but not identical).

For instance:

Such common code segments are ripe for refactoring, especially within a class or between classes in a heirarchy.

An added feature would be to create the refactoring required to eliminate the common code.

Help Wanted: profiling

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-24 08:08

JSR 163 - JavaTM Platform Profiling Architecture is defining a new profiling architecture to replace JVMPI.

For refactoring it is useful to know where the hotspots in a program are.

The task would be to create a JPPA client to fit into JRefactory and use it to mark classes and methods within the class diagram as regards to processor usage and object creation. Starting and stopping the target program profiling during a run would allow profiling during specific sections of a targets operation. It would be great to include animation of the class diagram (changing colours of the classe & method hotspots as the target runs).

JavaStyle 2.8 beta 2

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-19 17:53

This plugin for jEdit is now available in the development releases as 2.8.03

It should be mostly working, only a few minor bugs and some UI cleanup to do.

JRefactor Roadmap Updated

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-16 08:04

I've come across FindBugs http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/bugs/ which I will incorporate into JRefactory. It complements the coding standards support of PMD.

So JRefactory 2.8.xx will include the following functionality:

Roadmap

I've factored out only those classes required for the jEdit JavaStyle plugin and will be releasing a JavaStyle-1.5-beta2 soon with all the above features. There are still a few must fix bugs before that can be done however.

I plan to have JavaStyle-1.5-rc1 and the stand-alone JRefactory-2.8-rc1 ready in a couple of weeks. Then work on the plugins for JBuilder9 and NetBeans. The final release in the 2.8.xx series will be about mid October.

The 2.9.xx series will concentrate on better integration between components. Fixing bugs and targeting the 1.5 beta JDK when it becomes available. It will include some metadata support.

The 3.0.xx series will concentrate on additional functionality of the components. Particularly refactoring and metrics. It will be targeted to become final when the 1.5 JDK rc1 is released. I will release plugins for as many IDEs as possible.

The 3.1.xx series will be bugfix only.

2.8.01, JavaStyle-1.5-beta, new computer

Mike Atkinson - 2003-09-04 21:02

The new 2.8.01 release now has most of the features I plan for the 2.8.xx series. I'll concentrate from now on in improving the PMD integration, fixing bugs and enhancement requests.

The latest jEdit JavaStyle plugin is included with this release. It works with jEdit 4.2pre2 or later and when used with the ProjectViewer plugin allows the pretty settings for different projects to be specified separately.

My new computer comes tomorrow, at last I'll have enough disk space for efficient development, 10x processor speed won't harm productivity either :-)

Development will be on hold for a few days while I set up the computer.

2.8.xx now parses latest generics spec

Mike Atkinson - 2003-08-24 21:45

After coming back from vacation, I've been concentrating on the parser. I've just committed changes that allow the latest generics spec to be parsed. All of the code in the adding-generics-2.2-ea\src directory parses correctly.

There are still a few regressions in the refactoring code.

Getting a new much faster computer next week, I won't be limited by disk size or processor speed (no longer will I require up to 15 mins to perform the JUnit tests).

JRefactory 2.7.04

Mike Atkinson - 2003-07-29 10:25

This is available from http://www.ladyshot.demon.co.uk/ it includes JDK 1.5 support, UML diagram improvements and many bug fixes, these changes will soon be integrated into CVS.

2.8.xx development started

Mike Atkinson - 2003-07-19 16:34

I've started development on the 2.8.xx seriers of JRefactory. So far I've integrated PMD (working except for XPath rules) programming standard checking and I've fixed a few bugs.

The latest JDK 1.5 spec (version 2.2, Variance is gone, Wildcard is in) is now supported.