[Jxcl-devel] Re: So what's the status of JXCL

[Jim D. <jd...@di...>]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Dale King wrote:

> Just pinging to find out what the status of JXCL. Doesn't
> seem to be any activity recently. I'm interested in seeing a
> good OS coverage tool. Clover sucks. It tells me most of my
> class was not executed when it was. JCoverage/GPL is OK,
> but not great. I think JXCL can be better.
>
> You'll see that I submitted a patch that fixes the class path
> handling to work on Windoze.

? I haven't seen any patch.  Where did you send it?

> I have some ideas about JXCL.
>
> One is that there are tools like Jcoverage that instrument the
> code separately from testing it and JXCL which instruments it
> on the fly. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But
> there is no reason why JXCL couldn't do both. In both cases
> you have to read a class, instrument it, and produce data in
> class file format. That could be called from either a
> classloader or from a tool that wrote it to disk.

As you describe it, this is a fairly minor change.  All that you
have to do is write the byte array containing the instrumented code
to disk.

> I also want to be able to work in what I think is an absolute
> must for any coverage tool, which is the ability to declare
> certain code that isn't supposed to be executed so that it is
> not included in the total for calculating percentage. But it is
> absolutely vital that it also report it as an error if it is
> executed. I think it may be possible to implement that in JXCL
> even though it is only working from byte code.

Can you define exactly what you mean here?  Are you talking about
marking certain ranges of source code?  Or would you be content with
excluding code at the method level?

> But then again I have never actually seen JXCL in action. I've
> had to work to even get it to build and run on Windows.

The examples don't work?

--
Jim Dixon  jd...@di...   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
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