Teamstudio updates audit tool with new rules and IDE support April 25 — Recently, Teamstudio upgraded its audit tool for Java developers, Teamstudio Analyzer for Java Edition 2.0. The tool evaluates a Java project’s code, creating error conditions linked to specific pieces of code. Edition 2.0 includes more than 50 rules to check compliance with EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) specifications; custom rules; and support for Sun ONE (Open Network Environment) Studio, Oracle JDeveloper, and NetBeans.Mark Dixon, chief technology officer at Teamstudio says the product should appeal to the entire spectrum of Java developers. “It’s great for beginning Java developers because it gives them a head start on best practices without having to learn these things from trial and error,” he says. “Senior engineers also love the product because their goal is to write the best code possible, and any tool that can do that is appealing to them. Anybody can make a stupid mistake; the sooner you catch it, the better.”Teamstudio has an advantage over its big-name competitors, such as Borland, Parasoft, and Rational, because it offers the analyzer as a standalone tool instead of part of an entire suite of products. “The analogy I use is, ‘If you’ve got a headache, we’ll sell you an aspirin, not a frontal lobotomy,'” says Nigel Cheshire, Teamstudio CEO. “Teamstudio Analyzer for Java is small, has low overhead, is an easy-to-implement solution for a very specific problem, and you don’t have to buy into a whole suite of things that can be expensive and hard to learn to deploy.” Because it’s not integrated with a development suite, developers can more quickly analyze their code. “Typically it’s a separate step in these other tools to do your analysis,” continues Cheshire. “With our product, you can do it automatically as you go.”Plus, as a standalone product, Teamstudio costs much less than its competitors, a selling factor for Maxim Chpakov, senior software engineer for DaimlerChrysler Technical Sales Support, DaimlerChrysler’s e-business solutions provider. “We searched the marketplace for a long time and found that Teamstudio Analyzer for Java provides all the common services you expect, but costs one tenth of the typical price for similar products.”Chpakov has been using the product (version 1.127) for about two months now and is already beginning to see results: “It reduces the cost and increases the speed of a code review. The work of a few days can be reduced to seconds, and the review results can be analyzed within a few minutes. Plus, the tool improves the quality and the efficiency of a code review. No person can analyze code having more than 10 rules in his head. Teamstudio Analyzer for Java does it with more than 200 predefined rules, and you can add as many of your own rules as you wish.” Chpakov says his developers can now focus more on finding and fixing high-level errors, rather than searching for trivial coding mistakes. Though Edition 2 is already shipping, developers should also stay tuned for Edition 3, which will add an extra step to the audit process: an automatic fix. “One of the problems people have with a tool like this is that they run it on their code, and it comes up with 10,000 problems, and that’s scary,” says Dixon. “Most problems are trivial, code indented with tabs, rather than spaces, for example.” Edition 3 will be able to automatically fix these types of minor problems and reduce the errors down to a manageable number for analyzing. Build Automation