Java News from Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Brian Cole has posted FindBugs 0.9.6, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release focuses on improving the existing bug detectors. I tested this out on XOM. The interface also seems to have improved a little. In this release it's quite easier to find the serious bugs than I remember it being in the past. Almost all the bugs it found were false positives, but it did catch a couple of minor problems including a place where I was passing null to a constructor, and one place where I had a redundant check for null. If I hadn't used this tool frequently in the past, it would have found more.