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Semmle launches bug scanner for Eclipse


By Alex Handy
March 1, 2009 — 
False positives are the bane of all code scanners. But Semmle, a small company and tool that has emerged from research at Oxford University, is betting that a simple query language can take the sting out of code scanners. The company today has released SemmleCode, an Eclipse plug-in that brings bug-scanning capabilities into the open-source IDE.

Oege de Moor, CEO of Semmle, said that SemmleCode can ferret out many coding issues within Eclipse. The tool was originally developed in Oxford University's computer science department, where de Moor is a professor. De Moor also belongs to a programming tools research team at the university, and he focuses on aspect-oriented programming and refactoring as well.

“The idea here is that you take the entire source of a software system and store it in a relational format," said de Moor. "Then you do analysis. The kinds of things you can compute are all the usual quality matrices. It finds typical bugs, unmarked dependencies and all these things."

De Moor said that SemmleCode is “similar to FindBugs … But with [FindBugs] you have to be an expert. Tweaking analysis is really difficult.” But de Moor said that SemmleCode includes a simpler object-oriented query language that can make tweaking and customizing code searches easier.

“If you get false positives, it's typically because of the characteristics of your own codebase,” said de Moor. “These queries are written in an object-oriented query language, .QL. It's a modern variant of a query language called Datalog. It makes it possible to phrase the queries in familiar terms.”

SemmleCode costs US$499 per user, and it is targeted at both Eclipse users and software consultants. Currently, SemmleCode can scan Java and XML files, but de Moor said that new languages, such as C++, will be added over time.

“These days, if you have a big Java project, it's using Spring, [and there are] lots of configuration files. If you want to talk about dependencies you have to check XML. But the technology is not tied to Java,” said de Moor.

Aside from adding more languages, de Moor said that SemmleCode should gain new report and graphical capabilities in future releases.

“We always get more requests for different ways of visualizing. You can look at the results as heat maps or as problems in the Eclipse problems view. But people always want more ways of visualizing it,” said de Moor.


Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, Semmle


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