Work in progress

Recently I started to develop with Eclipse Kepler (version 4.2). I was quite astonished how much warnings it showed up for my code. Usually I trusted on the default configuration of Netbeans. Now I learned that for Netbeans I have to enable additional warnings. Like the javac compiler warnings which I found to be switched off.

I enabled these and moreover I checked my code with PMD and FindBugs. That brought more interesting hints. I improved one weakness after another. Now Findbugs doesn't show up weak points - in the default configuration. I have to learn about this.

This let me change the way some objects are created. Some classes had constructors which throw an IllegalArgumentException. I (hopefully) did it in a safer way along the CERT Coding Standards but ... If I attempt to create an object an get an exception - what does it mean? Maybe wrong arguments, technically. But domain-specific? I want a new car => boom! Exception. What was my fault? That I need a new car?

So I decided to provide a protected constructor with no checks of argument values and some public factory methods which will check the argument values and throw an IllegalArgumentException if necessary.

If there is a clone() method one of these factory methods will accept an object of this class as argument (objectToClone) and return objectToClone.clone as result. If the object is null we get an IllegalArgumentException.