Don't Miss What You Have Missed in Your InterSystems ObjectScript

Hi ObjectScript developers!

InterSystems ObjectScript is perhaps the best language on the planet to deal with globals - and it is an interpretable language.

Yes, it has a compiler. But even the compiler can compile some lines in ObjectScript which will then fire as bugs during the runtime.

There are some technics on how to avoid that such as unit testing, coding guidelines and your coding experience, of course ;)

Here I want to present to you the yet another approach to how you can reduce the number of errors in your ObjectScript runtime and enforce coding guidelines - it's an ObjectScript Quality tool developed by Lite Solutions, InterSystems solution partner.

See the details below.

We requested Lite Solutions to set up the analysis for the following 17 rules, which we find the most common "misses" of the compiler and which could be considered as possible bugs and "code smells" -  violations of coding guidelines and deprecated functions.

You can check how this rules work against the ObjectScript class (probably the worst ObjectScript class ever), where each method represents a certain problem the tool recognizes. And here is the analysis of this artificially introduced class. 

Here you can check other projects which already being analyzed by ObjectScriptQ tool.

How can you add the ObjectScript analysis to your project? 

This is very easy. Lite Solutions provides free-of-charge analysis for all the Open Source Github repositories with ObjectScript. Introduce this workflow.yml file in

.github/workflows

 folder of your public GitHub repository. After that every push to the repository will trigger a new analysis and you will get a newly made report on investigated issues in the repository.

This tool can work with private repositories too - you can examine the possible options and pricing plans on ObjectScriptQ site.

Collaboration and Evolution

If you find some false-positives or if you want to add a new rule to make ObjectScript better submit the issue to the Lite Solutions repository or discuss here on Developer Community, e.g. right in this post.

Happy coding and have your ObjectScript cleaner and healthier!