ilikeblues

As part of the R&D department in my company, I spend some of my time in quest for tools to make our developer’s life easier.

As soon as you go back to a previously written line of code (to read, check or even rewrite it…), you are entering the “maintenance mode”. That’s the reason why code maintainability is so important in software engineering. And, since mainly working on pseudo real-time systems (such as wireless sensor networks), performance in our tools is another important point.

So, TPTP eclipse plugin is a very useful tool for us. We integrate it in our projects from the very beginning of the development process.

From my point of view these are the strong TPTP plugin points:

1. Code Analyzer: it is fast, intuitive and highly configurable. A newbie will not spend more than five minutes to adapt it to his needs and correctly use it.
2. The “Quick Fix” functionality: in most cases, the solution proposed is pretty good.
3. The Profiling tool: though mainly interested in execution time and method coverage, I stated that this plugin covers many other useful functionalities.

On the other hand, there are some features that, of course from my point of view, should be improved.

Most of our application prototypes are being deployed as RCPs. And RCPs profiling executions are not completely working in all of our different development environments. In fact, Eclipse Europa environment and last TPTP plugin version (4.4) has been the first to give some information about that kind of applications (maybe due to unsatisfied dependencies in our previous environments).

In conclusion, some improvements in executions profiling will make this so helpful plugin be an indispensable tool for Java developers and SW engineers.