The OpenEdge Hive

Prolint release 73 has a couple of bugfixes, a couple of new rules and a new feature.

The new feature is: an easier way to contribute your own custom rules with the world, or to shop for new contributed rules that other people may have uploaded.
Previously you had to send your rule to me, I would commit it to the Subversion version-control repository and people would get it if they wait for a new Prolint release or if they browse Subversion.

This release is mainly a bugfix release. There are no bug reports left in the issue tracker anymore!

There is one new rule: andorparens looks at boolean expressions with a mix of AND and OR operators and will suggest you to use parentheses. This rule is inspired by a recent thread on PSDN, where people got in trouble because the compiler picked a different evaluation precendence than expected. With parentheses this would not have happened.

As always, download your latest copy from http://www.oehive.org/prolint/download

Bye,
Jurjen.

At last! This release is way overdue because it contains rules that were submitted by Glen West months ago.

Big news: Prolint integrates with Roundtable 10.1b !! Thomas Hansen adapted the existing integration for Roundtable 9.1a-c and now it works for Roundtable 10.1b.

A little bit unfortunate for existing users, who upgrade to Prolint 71 and were already using the Roundtable integration, is that they need to update their "rtb_evnts.p" procedure. It is simple: just follow the instructions on page Repair your Roundtable Integration.

As I am writing this blog entry it is not 10 June yet, but the countdown has begun. In preparation of the trip I have bought a brand new digital camera and installed an Image Gallery module in The Hive. My intention is to collect your mugshots, or other visual phenomena, and upload a daily picture journal during the conference.

Prolint 69 is ready!
It requires Proparse 3.1a that was released by John two days ago.

This release of Prolint could be aliased as "the OOABL release", because it can analyze every Object Oriented syntax construction. When it analyzes a class, it even looks in inherited classes to take inherited properties and non-private variables from those ancestors into the equation. Try that with grep :-)
But of course Prolint can still run in Progress 9 and analyze "traditional" procedural code as well.

In fact there are some new rules that are usefull for procedural source:

Only one week after release 66, so this must be a bugfix release...

Prolint learned some more about OOABL syntax. A new rule was added (publicvar) to search for PUBLIC VARIABLE statements in class files, because they have to be replaced by PROPERTIES in my humble opinion.

Not everything in release 66/67 is about OOABL.
The new rules bufdbproc, bufdbfunc and bufdbmeth are effective in "oldfashioned" procedural ABL too. But last week I made a silly bug in those rules and fixed it.

To get your free copy..... go to the download page!

If you are using OpenEdge and Object Oriented ABL, then you definitely need to update Prolint to release 66. Until now Prolint did not know what a class or a method was, and would give all kinds of silly warnings.

If you are using Progress 9, you may also want to upgrade to Prolint 66 to take advantage of new rules that check if you didn't forget DEFINE BUFFER statements in the scope of internal procedures and user-defined functions. (and yes, in methods too of course). There was a long and lively discussion on PEG about this recently.

In a few days it will be 5 February, the 10th aniversary of the “Progress Reference to Windows API”. It will also be the very last day of the global-shared.com domain.

It all started when Progress 7 was brand new; the first Progress version with widgets and persistent procedures. It was also the first Progress version designed for the Windows operating system and this was quite a culture shock for lots of Unix-oriented Progress developers who were used to editing loops and readkey statements.