Stack

Today's assignment is stack. My stack is here.

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Results

All five tasks completed successfully.

Problems

I had the same problem that Randy had with eclipse not finding classes. Thanks to Randy, it was easy to fix.

Thanks also to Jianfei Liao for pointing out that we might be expected to explicitly check for an install of JavaNCSS, even though a proper check is redundant to trying to use it.

I added the check in case it's required, but I still think it's bad. That kind of redundant checking can confuse people.

The most interesting thing I did was for the code coverage. I did add unit tests, but I also changed some of the non-test code.

ClearStack had a method called getTop that did nothing except call the method top inherited from Stack. So I changed it to be a single method defined in Stack and used directly without re-definition in ClearStack (just like push and pop). I wasn't sure whether the combined function should be called top or getTop, but I decided that getTop was more conventional. Coverage improved significantly.

Then I added a test to make sure that getTop throws an exception if the stack is empty. I also expanded the "normal" test to check getTop on a one-item stack and Stack.toString on empty and three-item stacks. That brought it to 100%.

Ant

Ant is a nice tool, but I think it sometimes tries to do too much.

It also has few rough edges. For example, if you try to expand a property it doesn't recognize, it silently uses the unexpanded form. That gives you things like:

[echo] PMD found ${pmd.failure.count} problem(s). 

Standards

I understand the motivation for the build file structuring, but I'm not pleased with it. What I'd like to do (but didn't) is:

1. Rename build.xml to compile.build.xml (and update all the import references).
2. Rename verify.build.xml to build.xml.
3. Import dist into the new build.xml.

That wouldn't make any of the files harder to understand. In fact, the new build.xml would be easier to understand than the old one. But it would make everything a lot easier. You'd do ant to verify, ant dist to make a distribution, ant pmd to run just PMD, etc.

JavaNCSS vs. SCLC

I prefer JavaNCSS. It was easier to get useful information out of the JavaNCSS output. It only looks at the Java code, but it looks at it in much greater depth. The SCLC output left me wondering "OK, what do I do with that?" It's also nice to have the cyclomatic complexity.

The non-comment line counts don't match, and I think that JavaNCSS might be excluding blank lines while SCLC is including them. That would be another plus for JavaNCSS.