You’ve just completed a grueling Java project. Though
everything works fine in the application you’ve created, you want to make sure
that the code for it also looks perfect, and follows standard programming
practices. Going through the entire code again will be quite a task. It’s here
that you can use QStudio Java to analyze your entire Java code. The tool also
gives you a list of better programming practices that you can apply throughout
your code. There are 44 rule IDs that correspond to 44 bad programming
practices.
QStudio Java |
Java source code analyzing tool. Price: 15-day fully functional version downloadable from www.ramsoftech.com. After this, you can order on the Website at $199 per year for three years; $259 per year for two years; or $299 for one year. The company provides free updates during the contract period. Features: Set of 44 rules for best programming practices; determines reliability, testability, maintainability or portability of a Java application. Pros: Security levels to determine how critical a warning is; project-oriented approach; comprehensive checking against defined rules. Cons: User must be very proficient in Java and object-oriented terminology to understand the warning messages. Source: Ramsoft Technologies No 4/1, 22nd Cross 8th Main, Jayanagar 3rd Block, Bangalore 560011. Tel: 80-6347152, 6644793 Fax: 6654755 E-mail: rat.in@ramsoftech.com |
The product requires JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.2 or
above and has a graphical user interface. Testing your Java source code is
simply a matter of telling QStudio the directory containing the files. These
files then become part of a QStudio project. You can run the QStudio analyzer on
a single file or the entire project containing all files. In case you’re
violating any programming practices, warnings will be displayed in a separate
pane on your screen.
You can see the results in a table that shows the rule ID,
the line producing the warning, category, security level, and warning messages.
Here, category refers to the reliability, testability, maintainability, or
portability of your code. An HTML page, accessible through the help menu, gives
a comprehensive explanation of each rule. This is divided into various sections
like Rule identification, Related quality attribute, Security level, Warnings,
Rule description, and Rationale.
Rule identification is the same as rule ID and is just a
number. The Related quality category specifies which category of the Java
application the erroneous code will affect–reliability, testability,
maintainability or portability. The security level is devised on a scale of 0 to
9 and specifies the criticality of the warning. We feel that the term
"security level" is a misnomer, as it can have other interpretations.
For example, from the point of view of a client-server implementation, security
can refer to whether the program can be hacked into or not.
The Warning section shows warning messages that have also
appeared during the code analysis. The Rule description gives suggestions that
can be followed for a warning. Finally, the Rationale section gives a short
explanation of what will happen if a particular rule is not followed. The
program considers even the simplest of rules like "Variable names i, j, k,
m, and n should be of type int". This ensures that your programs conform to
standards and can be understood by any programmer.
We tested a simple "Hello World" program in Java,
which just prints "Hello World" on the screen. QStudio Java produced
five warnings for this, out of which one had a security level of 5. That’s
quite a lot of error messages for such a small piece of code. So, it’s pretty
clear that QStudio goes through the code extensively. QStudio also has a version
for Solaris. You can buy the product from the company’s Website. The company
licenses the product to buyers for a certain period of time, and provides all
patches and upgrades for free during that period.
Shekhar Govindarajan at PCQ Labs