Shambling Towards Perfection

One of the issues for this sprint was improving my code's correctness. I installed and used the Eclipse plugins FindBugs , PMD , and CheckStyle . While these did point out some very valid issues, including not properly closing database resources, doing really bad things in an override of equals, etc., they also pointed out some things that completely flummoxed me. The biggest example is that apparently in Java one can declare virtually anything as final, including method parameters. I had known that methods and classes could be declared final though I had never used such functionality (nor had it explained or recommended either during my Bachelors degree or during my Masters degree, despite MANY Java-centric classes), but parameters was a new one. Some claim parameters should be declared final, while others say it clutters code for very little benefit. Additionally if you do, in fact, reassign a value to a parameter, the very same tools will mark it as an error. So there's qu...

I have finally overcome some technical difficulties, including finding a CS department machine that was actually up so I could retrieve info I needed that had been stored with my original code, and remembering that I had installed 32-bit Eclipse on my machine originally, because 2 years ago when I set it up Eclipse didn't play well with 64-bit Java. The latter resulted in my shiny new 64-bit Java 7 not working with the old version of Eclipse. Getting 64-bit Eclipse in the latest version (Juno) solved that problem. All the technologies, libraries, plug-ins, etc. I need for the project are now fully updated to the latest versions, and I was able to get my project running on my home machine (using Tomcat as the application server). It had been so long since I'd set things up that I'd forgotten how, so I did prove that the instructions I wrote up for my professor to follow worked very well. Go me. I have also been looking more into Java libraries that may help with variou...