JavaClass 0.4 released

Much has happened since I created JavaClass almost three years ago. I started with version 0.0.1 because much was missing in there. Since then I managed a small release once a year. Version two added class names and references. Last year I added classpath abstractions and moved the project from Rubyforge to Google Code (and then in the future to Bitbucket and eventually to GitHub). This year I finished version 0.0.4. Now the Java class file parser supports everything except fields and methods. Adding them would be no big deal, I just had no need to do it till now. This fourth release feels more complete and should rather be named version 0.4 than 0.0.4. So the next version will be 0.5.

New in JavaClass 0.4
I added support for Java 5 Enums and Annotations to JavaClass::ClassFile::JavaClassHeader and write code to retrieve all interfaces implemented by a class. Further I created Maven- and Eclipse-aware classpath abstractions. If you point JavaClass to the folder of a whole Eclipse workspace, you get a JavaClass::Classpath::CompositeClasspath containing all projects found in that workspace. Finally I fixed some defects, e.g. a character to byte conversion problem found in Ruby 1.9 and a printf inconsistency between Windows and Linux platforms. See the history of JavaClass 0.4 for the complete list of changes.

RDOC documentation was improved and several examples have been added. In fact these examples are real world scripts that I use to analyse code bases. They are just formatted nicely and commented in very detail.

Find Unused Classes
For example let us look for unused classes. By "unused" I mean classes that have no incoming reference inside a code base. Such classes might still be referenced by Java Reflection, but more likely are just dead code. I have seen legacy code bases where more than 10% of all classes were unused and their deletion was a welcomed reduction of the maintenance burden. A list of classes that can (potentially) be deleted is a valuable asset for the next clean-up cycle. Still, each class on the list needs to be double checked because classes with main methods, Servlets and other framework classes might show up on the list but still be used.

require 'javaclass/dsl/mixin'
require 'javaclass/classpath/tracking_classpath'

location = 'C:\Eclipse\workspace'
package = 'com.biz.app'

# 1) create the (tracking) composite classpath of the given workspace.
cp = workspace(location)

# Create a filter to limit all operations to the classes of our application.
filter = Proc.new { |clazz| clazz.same_or_subpackage_of?(package) }

# 2) load all classes of the application, this can take several minutes.
classes = cp.values(&filter)

# 3) for all classes, mark all referenced types as accessed.
cp.reset_access
classes.map { |clazz| clazz.imported_types }.flatten.
  find_all(&filter).
  each { |classname| cp.mark_accessed(classname) }

# 4) also mark classes referenced from config files.
scan_config_for_3rd_party_class_names(location).
  find_all(&filter).
  each { |classname| cp.mark_accessed(classname) }

# 5) find non accessed classes.
unused_classes = classes.find_all { |clazz| cp.accessed(clazz) == 0 }

The above example uses EclipseClasspath and TrackingClasspath under the hood. TrackingClasspath adds functionality to record the number of usages of each class. The classes that are not used by any imports (step 3) or any hard coded configurations (step 4) are potentially unused.

Java Class Literals in Ruby
Inspired by date literals in Ruby I thought about Java class name literals in Ruby. This feels a bit crazy so it is not enabled by default. After including JavaClass::Dsl::JavaNameFactory you can write

clazz = java.lang.String    # => "java.lang.String"

Note the absence of any quotes around the right hand side of the above assignment. The returned class name is not just a plain String, but also a JavaQualifiedName with some extra methods to work on Java names, like

clazz.to_java_file          # => "java/lang/String.java"
clazz.full_name             # => java.lang.String"
clazz.package               # => "java.lang"
clazz.simple_name           # => "String"

Adding these rich strings caused me a lot of trouble, but that is another story.