Five Fire Fox extensions you really cant live without

Since Fire Fox got its face lift from mozilla back in April 2003, the idea of a web browser has dramatically changed. No longer is a web browser just for reading pointless web sites along with the occasional work related article, it’s now a tool that is there to help you “surf” the web faster and more efficiently, Fire Fox had mastered this feat with it’s ever increasing extensions library.

I along with the majority of my colleagues use and love Fire Fox and amongst them the majority have Fire Fox loaded with the extensions that they literally can’t live without!!! It’s always the same old cycle, you browse Fire Fox’s extension library and see what’s new, you try some and realise straight away it’s pointless and then there is the ones that survive, the ones that over time you realise you use more and more every day, so much so that you forget that there not a standard!!

It is because of this that I’m giving my top 5 Fire Fox extensions!!!

1) Sage: Because were all very busy people and generally couldn’t be ar$ed trawling through the 30 odd web site “We Just have to read!!!!” Thanks to sage (among others) we can now have automatic feeds of our favourites blog’s all nice and neatly organized so we can quickly see if there are new/good articles that we should read with out having to go through the massive bookmark list.

2) Web Developer: A web developer’s hammer (meaning a pretty dam necessary tool) allows you to view your website showing all frames, tables, cells etc. That alone would get it to my top 5 list but along with tools for CSS, Images, Cookies this really is amazing!!

3) IE Tab: Unfortunately some web designers for some unknown reason believe that it is ok not to test in browser’s other that Internet Explorer. Even though we shouldn’t have to compensate for other peoples laziness, there is times we must, enter IE tab…. Loads pages in a tab that act’s like Internet Explorer therefore compensating for other people laziness…

4) Google Tool Bar: This does exactly what you’d think it would, Google in a toolbar. Also Loaded with option for automatically filling out forms for you, so saving you writing you address a hundred times a day, or if like the 75% of IT working people you have forgotten how to spell because of F7 Google toolbar comes with a built in spell check, a true life saver!!

5) ViewMyCurrency : No longer do you have to have a tab open with www.xe.com in it all day. No More Copying the price of that book on Amazon over to see how much it’s really going to cost, thanks to ViewMyCurrency the price it there on load, converted to your local currency, saving you precious seconds!!

The ones that I think are pretty cool, but just didn’t make the top 5…….

Mouse Gestures: Like Opera, allows you to navigate your browser using you mouse, i.e. right mouse button and up, opens new tab, right mouse button and left/right gets the previous/next page.

Google Notebook: Because the majority of us don’t have a photographic memory, copy interesting pieces of information and add them directly to a little notebook in fire fox so you never forget….

Reference:
Developer toolbar : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
View My currency : http://viewmycurrency.wordpress.com/
Google Toolbar http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/
IE tab : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/
Sage: http://sage.mozdev.org/
Gestures: http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/
Google Notebook: http://www.google.com/notebook/

Web Two Point Ohhhhhh

A web developers perspective

Visualize

As I have recently declared I am a big fan of PMD, I have also decided to do something to improve this project, this is in the form of yet another open source project Called Visualize.

I intend to use Visualize as a learning project for my self but also to help the increasing PMD community by allowing them to Import there PMD reports to Visualise which will in turn create a graphical and logical representation of the report, and if that isn't enough I intend to add the ability to compare report's, so developers could generate reports on a alpha basis and compare these outcome to see if standards are increasing or decreasing.

This is still at an analysis phase but more will follow.

Also check out https://sourceforge.net/projects/visualize for code/documentation (when their done of course....)

Automating Code Audits.

I’ve recently been researching the best ways of automating code audits within a development environment, what I mean my automated is that there will be a few alarm bells ringing and a reminder for the developer that there is something gone amiss when they break some rules. Before my research began I made a list of the things I was looking for, these were:

• Those Alarm bell’s, it’s FAR to easy for a developer to just make a mistake and leave it there, I want something to remind them that they have made a mistake and keep reminding them until they have fixed it.
• The ability to create my own custom rules. While yes I do want to find all the area where people for instance left out a curly brace around an if statement, I also want to look for things that would be company/project/personal specific rules. These can be anything, but I really really want them.
• The ability to generate reports based on the issues found. Preferably I would like these not to be too technical, simple enough so someone with no development skill can understand.
• The ability to bundle all my rules up and have them there nice and handy so that people can use only the ones I want to them too.
• Last but definitely no least I wanted all this as a plug-in for eclipse, I develop in eclipse, so it only made sense to look for this while I was there.

While I know what I was looking for was pretty close to a miracle, my miracle came in the form of PMD.

Before I elaborate on PMD, let me just say that my second option had been staring me in the face all along, that is error’s/warning functionality built into eclipse.

This is great, for the following reasons.

• It’s already part of eclipse
• Good selection of built in rules, from unused code, to JDK specific rules, also a very useful rule set for enforcing the use of Java Docs.
• I could automate the build set up se that all developers are using the same rules.
• And very important it has those very important alarm bells.

What eclipse did have (and therefore the reason I stopped loving it)

• No custom rules. This is extremely important, all companies/developers have there own standards and while in a perfect world it would be great if people always remember to use these rules, Alas it is not always the case.
• No report generation. I really think this could be invaluable to managers monitoring the quality of projects. If the amount of issues are decreasing by 100 every alpha, then GREAT!!! Big clap on the back for the developers. However if the issues keep increasing by 100 every alpha then maybe you need to have a chat with those guys.

Back to PMD,

While I’m not going to say much on the technology behind PMD as there is plenty of articles and web sites dedicated to this (bottom of this blog), what I am going to say is this, PMD has every thing and more of what I was looking for, custom rules can be easily (if not slightly cumbersome) created by means XPATH, allowing to search for custom string and by applying plenty of logic come up with some very interesting rules. While the reports generated are shabby (they come in the fore of xml, csv, html, txt) at least there is a report (and we can always work with the csv stuff).

So if we were to have one more look at that check list with regards PMD:

• Alarm Bells: Yes, errors levels can be set from Low to Hikearumba what are you doing!
• Custom rules. Yes, different methods of creating them, but xpath being the easiest
• Reports: Yes, messy but there.
• Bundle them all up: Yes
• Plug-in for eclipse, Yes.

And on top:

• Excellent Support, this is a very big open source project which is still very much active, so bugs are quickly fixed.
• Documentation, trying to create custom rules at first was daunting but this was quickly done one I found the reams of online documentation (and a book if you want to bug it)

Conclusion:

If you are looking for a code auditing tool for use with JAVA, PMD is defiantly worth having a look into. It’s pushing all the right buttons for what I want and I have been using it for the last 3/4 weeks and is still working like a dream.

Reference:

http://pmd.sourceforge.net/

http://www.eclipsezone.com/articles/pmd/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd/

http://pmdapplied.com/