Whither Crap4J?
Posted by Jeff October 23, 2008
Crap4J is/was a great Eclipse plugin which computes code crappiness via JUnit coverage testing vs. cyclomatic complexity. In short: Tests Good, Complexity Bad.
I tended to use it for TDD as a lightweight coverage tool. You could simply run a test, and the gutter annotations show if the line was tested or not:

Unfortunately, as of the Eclipse Ganymede release, Crap4j no longer finds the tests… and Agitar is defunct/acquired.
What’s a good Crap4J replacement?
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Crap4j has a contact page (http://www.crap4j.org/contact.html) that lists the email address contact.us@crap4j.org I wonder if anyone has sent an email directly to them asking about the project’s status. Whatever the status, it’s bad that they haven’t responded to the question on the forum for the last three weeks.
Hi Jeff,
Alberto here (1/2 of the dynamic duo behind crap4j - no pun intended … I think).
The bad news:
Various events and commitments in the past few months have kept us away from our beloved pet projects.
The good news:
Recent developments might give us an opportunity to not only continue to support Crap4j, but to take it to the next level.
Thank you for your kind words and interest and stay tuned.
Alberto
Hi,
Thanks for your fond notes about Crap4j. Indeed, it is not working with Ganymede, and dreamhost upgraded Rails, so the CrapoRama is also down.
I am the maintainer, and have been swamped with my day job after moving on from Agitar. I will be getting it updated to Ganymede shortly, and getting everything else back online.
I also need to update the forum software as it is hosted by the new owners of Agitar, McCabe technologies, and I want to get it under our control.
Bob Evans
Hi Jeff,
Have you had a look at Clover? The Eclipse plugin[1] for Clover will do exactly what you want. You can view uncovered lines (even branches) at the source level. You can spot crappy code in the “project risks” tag-cloud[2], or you can use the SUM metric[3].
Clover is a commercial product, however is free for open source projects, and discounts apply for Educational Institutions.
Cheers,
Nick
[1]http://www.atlassian.com/software/clover/CloverDownloadCenter.jspa
[2]http://clover.atlassian.com/browse/guice/
[3]http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CLOVER/clover-report#clover-report-ColumnNames
In the meantime, I’ve had good luck with EclEmma on eclipse-integrated coverage.
Cobertura is open source and does a good bit of what clover does.