Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I just wanted to know if you know of some projects that can help to decide whether the analyzed Source it is good code or bad RPG code.
I'm thinking on the terms of Software metric, McCabe Cyclomatic Number and all those things.
I know that those numbers are mere a hunch or two, but if you can present your management a point score they are happy and i get to modernize all those programs that otherwise work as specified but are painful to maintain.
so yeah .. know any code analyzers for (ILE)RPG ?
We have developed a tool called SourceMeter that can analyze source code conforming to RPG III and RPG IV versions (including free-form as well). It provides you the McCabe Cyclomatic Number and many other source code metrics that you can use to rate your RPG code.
If the issue is that the programs are painful to maintain, then the metric should reflect how how much pain is involved with maintaining them, such as "time to implement new feature X" vs "estimated time if codebase wasn't a steaming POS".
However, those are subjective (and always will be). IMO you're probably better off refactoring mercilessly to remove pain points from your development. You may want to look at the techniques of strangler applications to bring in a more modern platform to deliver new features without resorting to a Big Bang rewrite.
The SD Source Code Search Engine (SCSE) is a tool for rapidly search very large set of source code, using the langauge structure of each file to index the file according to code elements (identifiers, operators, constants, string literals, comments). The SD Source code engine is usable with a wide variety of langauges such as C, C++, C#, Java ... and there's a draft version of RPG.
To the OP's original question, the SCSE engine happens to compute various metrics over files as it indexes them, including SLOC, Comments, blank lines, and Halstead and Cyclomatic Complexity measures. The metrics are made available as byprooduct of the indexing step. Thus, various metrics for RPG could be obtained.
I've never seen one, although I wrote a primitive analyser for RPG400. With the advent of free form and subprocedures, it was too time consuming to modify. I wish there was an API that let me have access to the compiler lexical tables.
If you wanted to try it yourself, consider the notion of reading the bottom of the compiler listing and using the line numbers to at least get an idea of how long a variable lives. For instance, a global variable is 'worse' than a local variable. That can only be a guess because of GOTO and EXSR.
Lot of work.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm investigating different documentation systems for a project keeping up. Most recently I've been using DITA and the DITA OT, but its complexity makes me want to shoot myself.
Are there any systems that provide the following functionality:
Markdown support
Reusable content (I can refer to previously defined paragraphs or terms)
Localization support
Preferably, free or open source
Preferably, allows for multiple output
I wish I could use Pandoc for this, but it doesn't appear to support reusable content.
Edit: I just ended up writing my own library for this: https://github.com/gjtorikian/markdown_conrefs
If you don't mind reStructuredText instead of markdown, Sphynx is worth a look.
You could use pandoc + pre or post processor.
That way you could easily implement snippet reuse.
This is a topic close to my heart. There's quite a lot of Markdown processor options out there, but at time of writing those are more a case of personal solutions to this persistent problem. We all tend to get frustrated, make something to help in the short term, and share it.
The challenge has been to extend this to something built for purpose and at scale. Which is where I've turned my focus to over the last few years. That includes first working on PressGang CCMS inside of a tech writing team at Red Hat, and then being inspired to spin out Corilla, a dedicated technical writing startup building the tool you require.
PressGang (the prototype)
Please refer to the PressGang CCMS project for an idea of what we did at Red Hat to build tools to solve this. The lead engineer did a run-through video that you can see on Vimeo, and I've created a public Amazon AMI if you wish to try it. It's not being maintained but it's all open source.
It's a relatively large stack written for the most part in Java, but was useful as a look into an open source project in this space. But with bias I'd suggest...
Corilla (the product)
We cofounded Corilla as an open source company to focus on bringing together the elements of content reuse and collaboration with the ease of Markdown and Asciidoc. I've spent years writing DocBook XML, and quickly built my own snippets for Sublime Text to minimise the considerable overhead of authoring in that markup. The tide is of course turning. We need easier ways to write faster, and we need them to be discoverable, reusable, and allow the entire team to generate the content in formats they require.
I'd encourage you to get involved with the beta, as the technical writing and developer community is driving the project, and as we solve our problems together. Being able to resource and drive this to market is far more rewarding than having to pick through incomplete processor chains. I've been there, it's time we did more.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm hoping to show a visualization of the code base which can show areas that are overly complex and intertwined.
I know what clang is, but I'm not sure it gives me what I want in this case.
AnalysisTool: I know it's a clang wrapper but it also provides dependency diagrams.
AnalysisTool was originally created to serve two main purposes: to provide an easy-to-use executable binary of Clang static analyzer and to customize Clang by providing some additional checks. When Clang static analyzer was in its early stages, the only option for developers to try it out was to check out the latest source code of LLVM and Clang, compile it, and use the analyzer from the command line. AnalysisTool provided an easy-to-use GUI interface and removed the need to touch Clang source code. It also provided automatic updates, so that users of AT could always use the latest Clang static analyzer.
lizard:
This tool will calculate the cycolomatic complexity of C/C++/Objective C code without caring about header files and preprocessors. So the tool is actually calculating how complex the code 'looks' rather than how complex the code 'is'.
People will need this tool because it's often very hard to get all the
include folders and files right with a similar tool, but we don't
really need that kind of accuracy when come to cyclomatic complexity.
These are the only two tools I know, hope this helps.
Our Source Code Search Engine provides the ability to search across large sets of source code in multiple languages, using the code structure of each language to guide the search and minimize false positive matches.
As a side effect of its indexing process, it computes various complexity metrics (Halstead, McCabe) for files and writes that to an XML file you can process/display any way you like.
It has language front ends for C and C++; either of them ought to be able to process Objective C well enough for the SCSE to operator, and for OP's purpose, to compute such complexity metrics.
The downloadable version has the C front end included.
Edit June 2019: It has an Objective C front end now.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
As the years go by we get more and more applications. Figuring out if one application is using a feature from another application can be hard. If we change something in application A, will something in application B break?
We have been using MediaWiki for documentation, but it's hard to keep the data up-to-date.
I think what we need is some kind of visual map of everything. And the possibility to create some sort of reference integrity? Any ideas?
I'm in the same boat and still trying to sell my peers on Enterprise Architect, a CASE tool. It's a round trip tool - code to diagrams to code is possible. It's a UML centric too - although it also supports other methods of notation that I'm unfamiliar with...
Here are some things to consider when selecting a tool for documenting designs (be they inter-system communication, or just designing the internals of a single app):
Usability of the tool. That is, how easy is it to not only create, but also maintain the data you're interested in.
Familiarity with the notation.
A. The notation, such as UML, must be one your staff understands. If you try using a UML tool with a few people understanding how to use it properly you will get a big ball of confusion as some people document things incorrectly, and someone who understands what the UML says to implement either spots the error, or goes ahead and implements the erroneously documented item. Conversely more sophisticated notations used by the adept will confound the uninitiated.
B. Documentation isn't/shouldn't be created only for the documenters exclusive use. So those who will be reading the documentation must understand what they're reading. So getting a tool with flexible output options is always a good choice.
Cost. There are far more advanced tools than Enterprise Architect. My reasoning for using this one tool is that due to lack of UML familiarity and high pressure schedules, leaves little room to educate myself or my peers beyond using basic structure diagrams. This tool easily facilitates such a use and is more stable than say StarUML. (I tried both, StarUML died on the reverse engineering of masses of code -- millions of lines) For small projects I found StarUML adequate for home use, up until I got vista installed. Being opensource, it's also free.
With all that said, you will always have to document what uses what, that means maintaining the documentation! That task is one few companies see the value in despite its obvious value to those who get to do it. . .
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm trying to produce a timeline for my real-time embedded code.
I need to show all the interrupts, what triggers them, when they are serviced, how long they execute, etc. I have done the profiling and have the raw data, now I need a way to show the timeline graphically, to scale.
I've been searching for a good tool, but haven't come up with anything great yet. Everything that I've found works on timelines of days and years. I want a graph showing a single 2-millisecond cycle. For now I'm using Visio, but I keep thinking there must be something easier. Any ideas?
I'm hoping to produce something like this: .
Unfortunately, mine is more complicated, but that's the general idea.
So at that scale your abscissas is going to be a pure number (e.g. microseconds from the start time, or some such). Graphing tools to graph things like this are commonplace.
I'd suggest something like gnuplot, but I suspect there's more to the problem than is evident in your summary.
Ah, the picture makes it all much clearer. If gnuplot doesn't do it for you, I'll offer another suggestion (or at least tell you what I'd do): write it from scratch.
Specifically, I'd probably throw together something in a scripting language (ruby, python, whatever) to read the data and generate pic code that looked the way I wanted. If you decide to go that route, here's an overview of pic basics and also the manual. If you dig in you should have something plausible in an hour and within a week you'll have something that suits you better than any off the shelf GUI app ever will.
I feel for you. In my system, we have a 1.1 millisecond cycle and 13 measurement points over 4 different components. I suspect you're facing similar complexity.
Bad news is there are no off-the-shelf solutions I'm aware of. However MarkusQ is correct stating that you can use (abuse?) standard graphing packages to accomplish what you need. But you will need to invest some time to customize the output to your liking.
We make extensive use of the R Project driven by Python code via RPy R/Python bridge to generate our plots. This setup works very well for us and has enabled us to automate the process. Python is used to acquire and cleanse the data from the real-time system and R does the drawing.
R's graphics customization support is extensive allowing you to control all aspects of the plot, locations, sizes, etc. It can be intimidating at first, but there is an excellent book R Graphics that helps with a companion website that contains all of the book's examples.
Whatever you choose, make sure there's the ability to automate via scripting. The amount of data real-time systems generate is too much to deal with without flexible tools.
gtkwave could be used
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
I've been working with applications interfacing with SAP via a web service for a little while now and I want to get into programming the BAPI's behind the web services as well. My company has been using a SAP consultant for the BAPI programming and I'd like to move into filling that role also.
I have a decent amount of experience with the core functionalities of SAP as an end user, so I'm not completely new there. But I've never done any BAPI programming before and I've had a hard time finding good beginner guides. I'd like to find something for experienced programmers that takes you from the SAP equivalent of "hello world" to writing business critical BAPIs.
I've heard that BAPI coding is similar to coding in SQL, is that true?
Also, I'd like to find a free online guide, but I realize that might be wishful thinking so any comprehensive books would also be helpful.
I'm not sure about online resources, but there are a couple of quite good books to learn ABAP programming, you'd be looking for ABAP basics and/or ABAP objects (the latter one sounds better and more "advanced" but is typically just a more modern version of the language). One suggestion I've used in the past that is going quite a long way is this book. As these are "Enterprise books", be prepared to spend a bit more money than for a paperback book.
Topics that should be covered:
Data dictionary (SAPs term for definining tables, structures etc.)
Report programming
GUI programming (not really required)
functions (not sure about the English translation for "Funktionsbaustein", it is a function with parameters etc,. but defined in the data dictionary)
transactions
This would be some basics you should know before advancing to understanding BAPIs ..
BAPIs are just SAP provided functions (coded in ABAP and extensible) that are more "stable" between releases (i.e. they do not change all that much) and that can be called from within a SAP system or from "the outside" (either another SAP system or a non-SAP program).
SAP provides a lot of BAPIs (you can add your own if you want) that allow programs to do a lot / more of the stuff that users can do through the SAPGUI. Even though SAP's preferences are changing "daily", it is the preferred way of programming the SAP system on a higher level than just ABAP, comparable to plain Java vs. programming with an elaborate class library.
A lot of ABAP programming is like working in a 4GL (that's why it used to be called ABAP/4), lots of handling data you are reading/writing to a database, but also outputting that data to a user and handling user input. I'd describe it as a weird mixture between COBOL and VB ,,, and certainly a good skill to have.
What your developer calls 'BAPI coding' really is RFC coding.
BAPI's are an object oriented approach to coding where each method is an RFC.
If you want to write RFC (Remote Functional Calls), then there is this good step by step RFC tutorial:
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/26/64f61dfa8911d386e70000e82011b8/content.htm
(Only step 1 and 2 are of real importance to you)
Biggest beginner errors is:
Not setting the remote callable flag
Beware though, ABAP seems deceptively easy and I've seen terrible things written by developers who thought that knowing the syntax and SE11 was enough. As a junior ABAPer you should always have your specs/code vetted by a senior ABAP coder.
There are some specifics around BAPI programming as well - it's not just that the interface is stable or a fancy name for an RFC function module.
If a remotely-callable ABAP function module is to be called a BAPI, then it must meet certain transactional criteria (ACID).
See http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/a5/3ec8654ac011d1894e0000e829fbbd/frameset.htm