News

In January 2010 Oliver will have a talk about "Pleiten, Pech und PatternTesting" (in German) at the OOP 2010 in Munich.

Vision of PatternTesting

To be the Minesweeper of Your Java Code!

Overview

PatternTesting is a testing framework that allows to automatically verify that Architecture/Design/Best practices recommendations are implemented correctly in the code. It uses AOP and AspectJ to perform this feat. Read the What is Pattern Testing page for more details.

This project delivers several types of artifacts:

• patterntesting-parent: Contains nothing to deliver, but is the parent of all subprojects.
• patterntesting-rt: This is the runtime part which can be used standalone, without patterntesting-check. It contains some checks which are activated by the use of some annotations.
• patterntesting-check: Suites of reusable Pattern Tests (Aspects in AspectJ terminology); this is the core part where patterntesting started in the past.
  Since 0.9.5 it is splitted into
  • patterntesting-check-ct: compile time checks (static part)
  • patterntesting-check-rt: runtime checks (dynamic part). In contracdiction to patterntesting-rt (see above) these checks are on by default but can be disabled by annotations (e.g. @NullArgsAllowed).
• patterntesting-concurrent: This library contains some support to simplify concurrency but provides also testing of threads.
• patterntesting-exception: This is a wrapper for different JDK classes to provide better exceptions. It provides also an ExceptionFactory for testing.
• patterntesting-tools: Infrastructure tools to easily execute Pattern Tests on your project (plugins for Ant and Maven, report generation, etc).
• patterntesting-samples: samples how to use it

Why was it splitted into several subprojects? One reason was Maven. Maven recommends to use produce only one artifact per project. But the main reason are performance issues. If you use Eclipse 3.3 especially the old patterntesting-check library (which is now splitted) slows down the compile process. Now you can choose which part of PatternTesting you want to use in your project.

Antipattern

Errors in code can be annoying. Especially when they pop up in production and you realize that this kind of error could be have been prevented. There are antipatterns known in the internet which describes the cause of such errors and what you can to to prevent them. PatternTesting helps you to detect some common antipatterns and violation of common practices.

IDE and Compiler Version

If you use Eclipse as Java IDE you need the AJDT plugin. Use at least Eclipse 3.4 with AJDT 1.6.2 - it is much much faster than Eclipse 3.3 (see Performance Boost with Eclise 3.4 / AJDT 1.6.3).

If you use another IDE use the leatest stable version of the AspectJ compiler, but at least the version 1.6.2. This is the same version as the version of the Eclipse AspectJ plugin (AJDT). Older versions will also work but newer versions are faster.

History