As part of getting Crap4j going again, there are new mailing lists/
forums/code hosting site, and issue tracker.

I have not updated all of the website’s links yet, but here’s the
breakdown:

Mailing Lists:
Crap4j Announce - http://groups.google.com/group/crap4j-announce
For announcements of releases and blog posts.

Crap4j Users - http://groups.google.com/group/crap4j-users
For users of Crap4j to talk about issues, get help.

Crap4j Dev - http://groups.google.com/group/crap4j-dev
For people working on Crap4j. Submitting patches, etc..

There is a new issue tracking system:
http://code.google.com/p/crap4j/issues/list,
which is part of the new code hosting being used at google:
http://code.google.com/p/crap4j/.

Also, by virtue of the new code hosting site, we have a wiki for semi-
permanent documents: http://code.google.com/p/crap4j/w/list.

I have been adding issues for fixing crap4j itself, and the site’s
functions, as well as pulling over the issues from the old, defunct
trac system. Don’t ever try to run Trac on Dreamhost if you value your
sanity The old ones have not been ported yet.

Also, the CrapORama site is almost back to normal. There are still
some issues with the charting, but at least it responds now and shows
the global stats.

Thanks for your patience and kind emails, and look forward to more
fixes in the near future.

Well, as the year mark has rolled around, and I have been busy with my day job a lot has transpired. Eclipse has upgraded, and Dreamhost has upgraded the Rails libraries and the Trac libraries. Because of it, poor old Crap4j and its site have suffered some bit rot.

Fear not! I’ll be getting everything updated over the next month.

Items on the list:

1) Get Crap4j working on Ganymede.
2) Fix the Crap-o-rama to work on Rails 2
3) Fix Trac, or move to a better bug tracking/version control/proj mgmt solution
4) Move the forum from Agitar (now McCabe) hosting, so we can clean things up
5) Embark on bug fixes and issues filed.

Thanks for your kind thoughts, and if you’re looking to volunteer, please let us know at contact.us@crap4j.org!

We’re really excited to announce this version. There are a lot of little fixes in the Eclipse client and in the Ant client. But the big news: the stats page where you can benchmark your CRAP score against other projects anonymously or publicly, now allows you to tag your projects with labels and to see historical trends for your score.

The tag system will allow you to compare your project against other projects that share the same tags. For example, you could tag your application’s CRAP scores with ‘finance’, ‘v1.0′, ‘java’, ‘agile_methodology’, or whatever else. Then you can compare against other projects tagged ‘finance’, ‘v1.0′, and so on. Even without sharing your project, you can view projects by collections of tags. http://www.crap4j.org/benchmark/stats/.

We hope this will bring new meaning to the CRAP score, and eventually all metrics. If you previously uploaded a project, please re-upload it and add some tags to it.

We’re really excited to hear how people like this new feature. Please contact us, post on the forum, file bugs and feature requests, or if you really like it, just send cash (small and large bills accepted.)

Bob and Alberto

Crap4j will be kind of quiet over the next few weeks as we head off for the holidays.

We have a lot of fixes in the latest version, and a bunch of cool new features for the Crap-o-rama statistics website, but they’ll have to wait for the new year. We want them well-tested and we want to be around to support anybody who tries the new features, so we’re going to hold the release off until we get back from holiday.

In the meantime, please keep using crap4j, and letting us know how it goes. Some people will still be around looking at the forums occasionally, and I’ll read all the wiki updates and tickets when I get back.

See you in the new year, with lots of nifty new features and fixes.

Happy holidays. Peace and good will to all.

The wiki has been updated with several new pages. There are pages on:

• how to download the crap4j sources
• how to build crap4j
• crude descriptions of how the tool is organized
• feature story proposal pages
• meeting/organizing/collaborating on porting activity

Get a login and tell us about the features or make some new pages. (We wanted to require no login, but the comment and wiki spammers already found us.)

Version 1.1.5 of Crap4j is available at http://www.crap4j.org/downloads/.

It has some bug fixes, and a really exciting new feature or two.

The big feature is that you can share your CRAP results anonymously (or publicly) and see how you fare against all the other projects uploaded. It even puts the global average in the report graphic to make it more useful. (You can turn this off if it’s just too painful

You can see stats on other projects on the benchmark site.

We hope that this will help us understand the CRAP metric better in the wild, and that it will provide users an opportunity to check themselves against fellow developers.

Enjoy, and please let us know how you like it.

Well not quite a movie, but I’ve created a 6 min video showing the basic usage of Crap4J:

1) Run Crap4J

2) Identify crappy methods

3) Add tests or refactor crappy methods until you have eliminated them

The video quality is not very good due to YouTube’s compression, but it should help people get the basic idea of how to use Crap4j.

Here’s the link to YouTube: Crap4J Basic Demo.

Alberto

There’s a new version of Crap4j available. The big feature is Ant support via a new Crap4j Ant task.

This won’t mean as much if you are using the Eclipse plugin, but if you want to incorporate the Crap score into your regular build, or if you want more control over the classpath setup for your project, this will be a way to achieve it.

For the Eclipse users, you can just update the existing version via the Update Manager.

For the Ant version, there is a different distribution (sometime soon I will make it one download.) You can get the zip file at http://www.crap4j.org/downloads/crap4j_ant_latest.jar.

See the full usage instructions on the Ant Usage Page.

We hope you find it useful, and please let us know how it works for you.

Jeff Fredrick sent a link to the wiki for CitCon where there is a discussion about a session entitled, Crap4J and other metric tools.It points to several other tools for checking your code as well.

Greetings. We have released a new dot version of crap4j! You can get it on the downloads page.

We have fixed some bugs, and cleaned up some other things in preparation for new features. In particular, we fixed a problem with duplicate results, and some cases where it didn’t return properly from systems that use annotations. Also, the icon and menu items (popup and menu bar) are now enabled properly, and only when it is a java project that is selected. That should prevent some confusion.

We appreciate everyone’s bug reports and feedback. Thank you and we hope the new version works even better for you! (If not, please let us know or file a bug.)