Question

I just saw Clone Detective linked on YCombinator news, and the idea heavily appeals to me. It seems like it would be useful for many languages, not just C#, but I haven’t seen anything similar elsewhere.

Edit: For those who don’t want to follow the link, Clone Detective scans the codebase for duplicate code that may warrant refactoring to minimize duplication.

Answer 1

Java has a few – some of the most popular static analysis tools have this built in along with many other useful rules.

Ones I have used, in the (purely subjective) order that I was happiest with:

• PMD – comes with CPD – their copy and paste detector
• Checkstyle – specific rules to look for duplicate code
• Findbugs – the daddy of all Java static analysis tools. Includes duplicate code detection, along with just about anything else that you can think of, but quite resource intensive

There are some nice IDE plugins for all of these and many other reporting tools (for example, you can see results on a Hudson continuos build server, or your project’s Maven site)