Using Ant and automated quality assurance tools

This is my first time using the ANT build system, and open-source automated quality assurance tools (CheckStyle, FindBugs, PMD). At first I did not know where to create new environment variables, got that out of the way after learning it must by created in Windows Computer’s properties. One of the environment variables that we have to create but was not on the ICS 413’s Standards page is JAVA_HOME – for people who installed the Sun’s Java JRE too with the Java JDK.

When I heard that Ant and automated quality assurance tools was going to save me a lot of time. I was pessimistic at first, like how will this going to help me. Well, it sure helped a lot; I was able to change come “obsolete” code to “modern” code. It gave warnings and also hints on how to solve them.

I was able to complete all the tasks successfully and was able to pass the verification test. The three easiest errors to correct were the checkstyle, findbugs, and junit. I had one hard error that I did not know what to do; it was from the PMD test. So I went to watch some television for a little while and came back to tackle the error. I discussed with a fellow classmate on the problem, and finally able to come up with a solution. There were errors ranging from basic, use Integer.valueOf() instead of new Integer(), to challenging, replace the empty catch exception block. PMD have a site that links each error to it. I think that is great, but I did use google.com to look for tips on errors that were not hyperlinks.

Ant is an excellent tool to have when using automated quality assurance tools and distributing source files to others. It should help me a lot with this assignment. Since there is no standards for programmers to follow, with the Ant build system and automated quality assurance tools it is useful when distributing to others.

Here is my distributable .ZIP file: http://sites.google.com/site/phillipkhlau/files/stack-klau4-6.0.924.zip