Bill Pugh of the University of Maryland has released FindBugs 1.3.9, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. New bug detectors in this release include:
I tested this release out on XOM. It didn't find any real bugs, but it did point out one place where XOM should probably be making a null-check a little earlier than it does, enabling it to short-circuit a common path rather than waiting for an exception to bubble up and be caught. Further investigation along that code path has made me start to rethink how relative URLs are handled.