Oli's Blog

On 23th March 2002 Matt Smith and Vincent Massol initiated PatternTesting to find some of the common anti patterns like a forgotten e.printStackTrace you can find in many projects.

2002 is also the year where asserts are provided with JDK 1.4. With this new keyword it is possible to place detectors in your code for better findings of programming errors. Together with PatternTesting it is possible to automate this process e.g. to find method calls which get null arguments or returns null as return value - a common cause for NullPointerExceptions.

Today is now released the jubilee release - PatternTesting 1.2.10-YEARS. One of the new features of this release is PatternTesting Agent which must be started as Java agent:

java -javaagent:patterntesting-agent-1.2.10-YEARS.jar ...

It provides the ClasspathMonitor of PatternTesting Runtime with the needed infos about the class loader to find unused classes or Jar files or to detect incompatible classes (this are classes with the same signature but different versions). The agent is only needed for class loaders which are not direct supported by the ClasspathMonitor (as e.g. is the case for the IBM JDK). For the normal Sun JDK you don't need it.

More infos how to use the ClasspathMonitor can be found in the PatternTesting Wiki. Look at the Hello World example in the section Getting Started.

Happy PatternTesting