Tuesday March 14, 2006

Programming Accidents (aka Bugs) - Revisited In my previous blog I was describing a bug I ran into, that was caused by me forgetting to pass a parameter on to a superclass constructor. This could have been avoided if the Java compiler would have warned me that I had never used the parameter passed to the subclass constructor. But unfortunately javac doesn't support this kind of warning (at least yet).

Meanwhile I found a plugin for NetBeans named PMD for NetBeans. PMD (short for ... well nobody really seems to know what PMD stands for) is a tool that scans for potential problems in Java source files. It is highly configurable, which is a good thing, because some of the rules used to identify potential problems might be controversial to some people, but not to others. It is even possible to write your own rules. Anyway, I installed it, configured it for my own needs, and I am pretty happy with it.

You should give it a try too. Worst thing that can happen is that you find some potential problems in your sources.

Happy programming!

Posted by herbertc ( Mar 14 2006, 08:45:00 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]