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Another Couple of Interesting Tools

These have both been useful to me on projects when I have been trying to get my head around reams of grungy C code (you know the type, where the programmer continually felt the need to use *(p + i) instead of p[i] “because it is more efficient”).

doxygen, http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D.

cscope, http://cscope.sourceforge.net/

Cscope is a developer’s tool for browsing source code. It has an impeccable Unix pedigree, having been originally developed at Bell Labs back in the days of the PDP-11. Cscope was part of the official AT&T Unix distribution for many years, and has been used to manage projects involving 20 million lines of code!

To a degree, modern IDEs can help in the problem spaces addressed by both these tools; sadly, one just can’t rely on always having a modern IDE available, however.

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Java Enterprise Edition, JEE, JavaServer Pages, JSP, Tag Libraries, Servlets, Enterprise Java Beans, EJB, Java Messaging Service JMS, BEA Weblogic, JBoss, Application Servers, Spring Framework, Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Seam, Open Source, Service Oriented Architectures, SOA, Java 2 Standard Edition, J2SE