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Review
CodeCleaner
Issue: 2.2 (October/November 2003)
Author: Brian Jones
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,889
Starting Page Number: 10
RBD Number: 2206
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
One of the rarely used features of REALbasic is the ability to include IDE Extras, applications that expand the functionality of the REALbasic development environment. By dropping these applications in the IDE Extras folder, users can fire up the addition at any time and take advantage of new features. CodeCleaner from DomainSoftworx is a great example of an IDE Extra. It offers a variety of features that will rearrange your code to provide a cleaner, more readable structure and presentation, great for coders working in a collaborative environment or making their work available to the public in the form of tutorials or open source code. All that you do to use CodeCleaner is to add it to the 'IDE Extras' folder and select it from the 'IDE Extras' menu. Once selected, CodeCleaner can be told to operated on any selected body of code.
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No description available.
CodeCleaner's beauty is its simplicity. It has a relatively limited feature set, but it does everything it sets out to do well. This add-on will not teach you to code better, but it will do everything that you know you should do for you when it comes to writing clean, readable code.
For one, CodeCleaner will rearrange variable declarations. Rather than having a hodgepodge of different types floating about at the end of an incremental development process, you can separate your variable declarations out by type, both by putting them all on a single line and by separating them out in blocks separated by linebreaks. This feature is important to developer because it provides an easily accessible record of the variables in use in a particular method without any preliminary planning and without any backtracking to clean things up.
CodeCleaner will perform other tasks, most of them less important to the developer and more important to those readers who are less familiar with the code. For example, CodeCleaner will insert spaces around any operators. Many programmers do the same by force of habit, but every once in a while these spaces are forgotten. With CodeCleaner, you can make your code more readable by adding in the whitespace where it is necessary.
CodeCleaner does nothing that the developer could not do on his or her own. However, it is a nice convenience, particularly in those projects that are large enough that such errors, or at least inconveniences, can be difficult to find. If you write code the "right way" or typically fix formatting in a review process, then CodeCleaner is not for you; however, for the rest of us, particularly in a RAD environment like REALbasic in which incremental development is so easy, who often end up with spaghetti-like messes of code, CodeCleaner can help. The only inconvenience lies in the way that CodeCleaner interacts with your code. It will only clean a selection, there is now way to have it search more generally for imprecise coding. Other than that one small inconvenience, CodeCleaner is definitely worth looking into for anyone working with collaborative or publicly available code.
In Brief Product CodeCleaner Manufacturer Domain Softworx Price $7.99 Contact Info www.domainsoftworx Pros Convenience Cons Not a replacement for good habits Rating (1.0-5.0): 4.0
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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