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Looking for books or other references that discuss actually how to write a code coverage tool in Java; some of the various techniques or tricks - source vs. byte code instrumentation.

This is for a scripting language that generates Java byte code under the hood.

Joris Schellekens
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5 Answers5

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Does your scripting language generate bytecode? Does it generate debug metadata? If so, bytecode instrumentation is probably the way to go. In fact existing tools will probably work (perhaps with minimal modification).

The typical problem with such tools that they are written to work with Java and assume that a class com.foo.Bar.class corresponds to a file com/foo/Bar.java. Unwinding that assumption can be tedious.

EMMA is a ClassLoader that does byte-code re-writing for code-coverage collection in Java. The coding style is a little funky, but I recommend reading source code for some ideas.

If your scripting language is interpreted then you will need a higher-level class loader (at a source level) that hooks into the interpreter.

Rov
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Dominic Cooney
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Thxm, Mc! http://asm.objectweb.org/ is another one. Excellent documentation on byte code instrumentation, but nothing "directly" aimed at writing a coverage tool - just some hints or ideas.

Saby
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You can also get the source from a Open Source code coverage tool and learn from it.

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If you're talking about ColdFusion (which I assume you are from the tags) then I'm not sure this is doable but I may be very wrong here...

IIRC, When CF compiles it essentially compiles into a interpreted form of the CFML as a plain old java source file, this is then compiled into the class. Therefore, any instrumentation that you may have will apply to the intermediary version rather than the CFML itself.

Saying that though, Adobe have got the CF debugger now which can step though code, so please prove me wrong - I'd love code coverage in CFML.

Neil Middleton
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  • See my response about "Branch Coverage for Arbitrary Languages Made Easy". Instrumenting the CFML code directly and then compiling it to Java would still give test coverage data directly for CFML. (I build test coverage tools for a living). – Ira Baxter Jul 03 '10 at 17:46
  • What's this all about? Rancho code coverage for ColdFusion http://kunalsaini.blogspot.in/2012/05/rancho-code-coverage-tool-for.html – J.T. Jan 28 '13 at 17:26
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You might also want to use something like BCEL to analyse which lines of source actually exist in the byte-code. You don't want to report that things like blank lines and comments haven't been covered.

djpowell
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  • This isn't a good idea unless the line numbers in BCEL match those in the OP's DSL exactly. If they don't, you get coverage on the "wrong" source lines. – Ira Baxter Oct 31 '11 at 21:15