This article presents seven techniques I\'ve developed and used in my consulting work that are designed to improve legacy code.
Tutorial Details:
Use a Stronger Compiler for Your Code
This technique calls for a tool change to a stronger compiler. While there are many Java IDEs on the market, most of them use the default Sun compiler. Unfortunately, this compiler is not as strict as it could be. Many common programming errors slip through the cracks. The following code illustrates one of these errors:
public class SomeClass {
private String someValue;
public SomeClass(final String someValue) {
this.someValue = someValue;
}
public void setFirstName(final String value) {
this.someValue = someValue;
}
}
In this example, the developer meant to change the name of the property from value to someValue. The developer did a good job in changing the instance variable and the constructor, but he didn\'t change the name of the parameter to the setter. The resulting error is that the assignment in the method setFirstName() has no effect since it merely sets this.someValue to whatever it currently is. As a result, SomeClass has a difficult-to-find logic bug. Unfortunately, the standard JDK compiler will not find this problem, but there are other compilers that will. The compiler that comes with the free Eclipse platform can be configured to look for problems such as these. It can check for assignments that have no effect, variables that are unused, and a host of other issues. Not even the expensive JBuilder product can do many of the things Eclipse does for free. For example, I had a client who was using the JBuilder IDE. When I imported the project into Eclipse, it detected some 200 bugs in 700 classes that JBuilder didn\'t find. Although this led to long debugging sessions, the project\'s code became more stable and the client\'s customers much happier. Today this company uses Eclipse as its main tool. (For more on Eclipse, check out O\'Reilly\'s just-released book on mastering the Eclipse platform.)
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