Well, I had to go check out Guantanamo to see what it was all about. I wasn't very impressed, but like it's namesake, it's still not mature. Hopefully only *this* Guantanamo turns into something mature!

The code under test is the NetBeans Model Driven Repository code. This code has some very substantial tests written for it as a JCP TCK, so I took it upon myself to see if I could use those tests as the driver for Clover code coverage.

That worked just fine, so the next step was to see if Guantanamo could clean up the code a little... well a lot. If you look at the stats for the code, about 60% of the 38K lines of actual code could be removed. This would be great if it worked!

I was rather disappointed though. The author of Guantanamo is the project lead for Qdox. Qdox uses JFlex for lexical analysis of the Qdox input. While I presume that this code was originally written by Joe Walnes, using JFlex is not very difficult and I would have expected that Guantanamo was using this technology to parse the sources and make intelligent code removals. What I ended up with were simply blanket removals of lines. In the end, the source did not compile, there were hundreds of syntax errors in the generated code.

I'll give it another look in the future though. While it's not a tool that I would use every day, there is a lot of validity to what is going on here. I'm inclined to believe that a simple speedmenu interface that could be brought up from the Clover IDEA plugin sidebar would be a nice addition This would be similar to what exists already in the IDEA 4.5 diff window.