Handy Tools for Java Development

Some links to basic, but nevertheless interesting tools for java development, especially in larger projects. All of them are available as eclipse plugins.

Code quality

FindBugs: Very useful to detect (potential) bugs, deficiencies and general ugliness.

UCDetector finds code that is not referenced and therefore (possibly) not used anymore. (Even points out that something is referenced by testing code, only.) Works on classes as well as on more fine-grained levels. Also proposes to reduce visibility of structures, e.g. to make things private.

EclEmma is a java code coverage tool. This becomes a powerful utility in combination with JUnit-Tests. Running the unit-test using the coverage starter lets EclEmma analyze the tested code. After the tests complete, the code covered by your tests is visualized in the editor window. (Green for covered, red for not.) This lets you easily identify code fragments that no test ever "visited".

Testability Explorer: Reports on the testability of your classes in terms of a number. Gives a quick overview of which classes definitely need some work.

Debugging

VisualVM: Stand-alone program that allows you to connect to a running java-prog and dump its heap. The latter can then be opened for analysis, e.g. by the Memory Analyzer (see below). An interesting feature is to let VisualVM automatically dump the heap in case the program under scrutiny receives an OutOfMemoryError. This way you don't need to sit next to the screen all the time, until the memory leak occurs.

Note that you need to use the *Java 6 JDK*. Both VisualVM and the inspected program need to use it. If your default is another Java installation, then you need to point to the Java 6 JDK using the command-line argument "--jdkhome".

Memory Analyzer (MAT) does just that: It loads a heap file that might have been created by VisualVM for instance. Then, it tries to detect classes responsible for a memory leak and more. See the home page for details.

Management

Projectset: Manages dependencies between multiple projects. Takes versions / branches of VCSs into account. The adaptor to CVS is included, the ones for SVN are available from the project's homepage.

PDDL Examples

Going to collect some examples for PDDL, problem collections from competitions, especially interesting configurations, etc.
For PDDL being the primary language of planning, there are way to little (centralized) resources on the topic, so this is my lil' contribution to help people find something and get started.