Some Useful Tools

They say school teaches you "how to learn", that's true, but I also believe some tools that aren't covered in any class would be really helpful to mention to help students to get a better coding style, awareness of overlooked errors, as well as good testing skills.

Here's a list of Eclipse plug-ins I recently used a lot in testing my Computer Architecture and O/S classes:

Checkstyle:
http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/

Findbugs:
http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

EclEmma:
http://www.eclemma.org/index.html

Metrics:
http://metrics.sourceforge.net/

Subclass NSURLConnection

My recent work involves change two synchronous NSURLConnection to asynchronous, so loading data won't block UI.

I created a custom subclass of NSURLConnection to do this, with a tag I just need to specific the name of that connection at the time I created it, and then checking it while I receive data.

Here's the code:

.h file:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

@interface CustomURLConnection : NSURLConnection {

NSString *tag;

}

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *tag;

- (id)initWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request delegate:(id)delegate startImmediately:(BOOL)startImmediately tag:(NSString*)tag;

- (NSString *)tag;

@end

.m file:

#import "CustomURLConnection.h"

@implementation CustomURLConnection

@synthesize tag;

- (id)initWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request delegate:(id)delegate startImmediately:(BOOL)startImmediately tag:(NSString*)newTag {

self = [super initWithRequest:request delegate:delegate startImmediately:startImmediately];

if (self) {

self.tag = newTag;

}

return self;

}

- (void)dealloc {

[tag release];

[super dealloc];

}

- (NSString *)tag {

return tag;

}

@end

And I used it like this:

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data

{

ALog(@"Connection %@ received data.", [(CustomURLConnection *)connection tag]);

if ([[(CustomURLConnection *)connection tag] isEqualToString:@"someConnection"]) {

[someData appendData:data];

}

else if ([[(CustomURLConnection *)connection tag] isEqualToString:@"someOtherConnection"]) {

[someOtherData appendData:data];

}

}