Description Eric Bodden 2007-05-09 08:25:09 EDT

Hi all.

Four a course project I have developed a plugin that helps manage the concern
of object cloning in Java, using Eclipse. The plugin consists of two parts:

1.  An Eclipse builder that detects four different code smells w.r.t. cloning:
         1. Returning null from clone()
         2. Never calling super.clone().
         3. Implementing clone() but not Clooneable or vice versa.
         4. In a Java 5 project, not using the covariant return type for
            clone().
2. A code generator very similar in style to "generate hashCode()/equals()"
that allows to generate correct clone methods with selective deep copy of
fields that have as declared type a reference type that also implements
Cloneable.

You can download the plugin and a report plus slides about it at the attached
URL. My question is whether you would consider integrating this functionality
into the main Eclipse build stream. I deliberately tried to make the
implementation as consistent as possible with the current implementation similar features in Eclipse.

The flip-side for me is that because of that I use a lot of internal APIs.
Hence, integration into Eclipse would be very desirable from my point of view.

This bug is about integration of the checking part (bullet 1.) into JDT Core. Bug 182327 describes the integration of the code generation UI (bullet 2.) into JDT UI.

Thanks in advance!