magpiebrain

“FindBugs”:http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/bugs/ is a Java tool which aims to find possible bugs in your code. I use “Eclipse’s”:http://www.eclipse.org/ own code checker and the Eclipse “Checkstyle”:http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/ “plugin”:http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/ for this purpose, although it seems that Findbugs may pickup some things these tools don’t, such as:

• Places where a null pointer might be dereferenced
• I/O streams that are opened, do not escape the method, and are not closed on all paths out of the method
• Methods that can return null instead of a zero-length array
• Using the == or != operators to compare String objects

I might try runing it on my code base and see if it picks anything up…