Edit ArticleS.DeanWampler.Contract4j5060Released:

!title Contract4J5 v0.6.0 Released

After a longer-than-expected effort, I just released v0.6.0 of [[!-Contract4J5-!][http://www.contract4j.org]].

!-Contract4J5-! is a tool for doing Design by Contract in Java 5. The test conditions are defined using Java 5 annotations. [[!-AspectJ-!][http://www.aspectj.org]] is used to implement !-Contract4J5-!.

You can find out more [[here][http://blog.aspectprogramming.com/articles/2006/09/21/contract4j5-v0-6-0-is-now-available]] and [[here][http://contract4j.org/contract4j/c4j5#notes]]. The main web site is [[http://www.contract4j.org][http://www.contract4j.org]].

----!commentForm

!* Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:49:34, www.EdmundKirwan.com, Dogfood
Dean, Dean, Dean.

Circular dependencies? Six of the little blighters? From a code-mentoring shop? What would mum say ...

.ed

''It used to be worse. ;) A drawback of AspectJ is some of the hoops you have to jump through to reference aspect "objects" from Java, which are singletons by default, etc., etc. I also left in a few wierd relationships to support configuration options. If I could have assumed just Spring DI, then several of the hacks would go away. Anyway, I didn't look specifically for circular dependencies, but I guess I'll have to now ;). - dean''

''So I took a look at the dependencies with JDepend and I was able to remove most of them with some simple refactorings of the package structure (using Eclipse...). I'll fix the others later as I work on the next set of enhancements. I appreciate the "nudge" to look at the dependencies. C4J isn't intended to be a "paragon of design virtue", but why not make it the best it can be? ;) To be honest, I hadn't really tried very hard to prevent cyclic package dependencies before because they weren't causing any real pain. Eventually, they would become painful if C4J got big enough. As I discussed in my release notes, most of the work on this release was to fix more pressing "smells". The cyclic dependencies weren't very smelly, yet.... - dean''

*!
!* Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:48:58, Eirik M, Does it handle inheritance
or is it just a tool for client-provider DbC?

''I'm not sure I know what you mean by client-provider DbC. Concerning inheritance, complete support for the proper contravariant behavior of preconditions and covariant behavior of postconditions is not implemented, although a reasonable "80% solution" is planned. The tool will apply parent-class tests to subclasses. However, because Java annotations on methods can't be inherited, you must currently add the annotations to the corresponding derived-class methods. You can leave the test expression off; C4J will walk the inheritance tree to find it. I'm also considering a runtime fix for this limitation to remove the requirement to add the annotations. It would add noticeable run-time overhead, but the more correct behavior would justify it, I think. These are several of the reasons it is not yet considered "1.0". - dean''
*!

Hints:

Use alt+s (Windows) or control+s (Mac OS X) to save your changes. Or, tab from the text area to the "Save" button!
Grab the lower-right corner of the text area to increase its size (works with some browsers).