Tom Copeland has released PMD 1.9, an open source tool for automatically checking Java code for various classes of bugs. PMD scans Java source code and looks for potential problems including:
As is my custom, I tested this by running it across XOM's code base.
I wasn't expecting much because I do this with almost every release of every static code testing tool, and indeed it didn't find very much, just a few unused local variables, one catch block that should probably catch specific errrorrs and exceptions rather than a generic Throwable, and some statements that were at least arguably correct.
Nonetheless, if you haven't tried PMD on your code, you should. The documentation is poor and the user interface is cryptic, but it's worth deciphering.
The first beta of
BlueJ 2.0, a free integrated development environment
(IDE) for Java aimed at education, has been released.
The major new feature in 2.0 is support for Java 1.5 (a.k.a Java 5).
Slava Pestov has uploaded the 15th
pre-release of jEdit 4.2,
an open source programmer's editor written in Java with extensive plug-in
support and
my preferred text editor on Windows and Unix.
This release "formally allows
development of non-GPL jEdit plugins", fixes bugs, and updates a few syntax highlighting modes.
Martin Auer has released UMLet 3.2, "an open-source lightweight Java tool for rapidly drawing UML diagrams, with a focus on a sound and pop-up-free user interface." It can export diagrams to SVG, JPEG, EPS, and PDF formats and can be used as an Eclipse plugin. UMLet 3 is published under the GPL. Java 1.5 is required.