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David Bürgin edited this page Nov 15, 2015 · 14 revisions

References

Notes

Some pointers.

Other Tools. The Checker Framework has not yet arrived in the mainstream Java community. In any case, other competing or complementary static analysis tools are also worth investigating. Some well-known names with various scope are SonarQube, FindBugs, PMD, Error Prone.

IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA have gained excellent nullness inference capabilities in recent years, and these are proudly being advertised, too (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA). The Checker Framework plugin for Eclipse has worked well for me and can be used without even touching a Maven POM.

null. Tony Hoare, the inventor of the null reference has famously called his invention ‘his billion-dollar mistake’.

Assorted remarks about the dangers of null are pervasive in the Java standard literature. I will just point to some additional resources here. We’ve linked to the page ‘Using and avoiding null’ on the Guava wiki in the text. The Programmers Stack Exchange has some topical questions ‘Are null references really a bad thing?’ and ‘If null is bad, why do modern languages implement it?’ with some insightful answers.

Discussions of Optional tend to remark on null and the problems associated with it. Articles I’ve found useful include ‘Avoiding Null Checks in Java 8’ by Benjamin Winterberg, ‘Java 8 Optional Objects’ by Edwin Dalorzo. Platform developer Stuart Marks talks about Optional at JavaOne 2015.

Research. The Checker Framework comes out of academia, and there are a few interesting papers about nullness analyses in Java out there.

todo

A Checker Framework tutorial

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