Passing unit tests are good. 100% code coverage is good. Continuous integration builds are good. But what happens when your IDE has a cool feature that lives outside of your automated tool suite?
Earlier this week, I was raising test coverage on some legacy Java Spring code. I usually commit changes from the command line, but I decided to use IDEA's svn integration instead. By default, this integration does some code review, reporting various hints. This is pretty cool, and it helped me find problem areas in the code. But the code review also poses a problem:
- How do I invoke these hints programmatically, so that I can include them in continuous integration?
- How do I overrule these hints on a case-by-case basis? This is incredibly important. If I could disable a hint in a particular location, I would open a whole universe of heuristic hints that are useful, but report too many false positives to simply run across the entire codebase.
- How do I track history? Overriding a hint should have a textual representation that goes into source control.
All IDE code-analysis functions should be exposed as services first, then skinned into the IDE interface. Wouldn't it be cool if the interfaces to these services were (even partially) standardized? Then we could share features across different IDEs. A good starting place for such standardization would be TextMate's elegant command model.
For Ruby, Tor Norbye is adding Ruby hints to NetBeans. Hopefully there will be some way to selectively enable such hints, scoped to specific regions of code.
Comments
Are hints like warnings?
Java’s new compile-time annotation processor (JSR 269, introduced in Java 6’s compiler) can get you part of the way. It doesn’t get into the bodies of methods, but it supports everything else. The compiler API may even take you the rest of the way.
You can generate warning from annotation processors. These were made with IDE support in mind, so in Eclipse, you would see yellow squiggles.
As for overriding warnings on a case-by-case basis, you can use @SuppressWarnings.
In the ./bin directory of your Intellij IDEA installation is a inspect.sh script which should run the code inspections from the command line.
I’ve not used it (and notice that the script under the current EAP is giving me some trouble on OS/X but I think thats environmental on my behalf).
Hopefully that’ll provide you the support you want.