Thonny is a Python IDE for beginners, but it is easy enough to use to make it suitable for the occasional Python programmers. It comes with Python 3.5 built in so that you need to run only single simple installer. The initial user interface is stripped of all features that may distract beginners.
VisualVM is a visual tool integrating commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities, designed for both development and production time use. It is essentially a debugger for the Java VM.
This release adds experimental support for running on JDK 9 and monitoring/profiling Java 9 processes, fixes many bugs and builds on top of NetBeans Platform 8.0.2. VM Coredumps support on Microsoft Windows has been enabled.
In addition the VisualVM project has been migrated to GitHub, including the sources, downloads and update centers. New project pages have been created at https://visualvm.github.io and the content will be incrementally transferred from the original pages at https://visualvm.java.net.
We seem to know remarkably little about the effectiveness of many of the techniques we use. This research from North Carolina State University and Fraunhofer CESE offers some needed guidance on when a code reorganization is necessary by way of a new tool:
Developers use bad code smells to guide code reorganization. Yet developers, text books, tools, and researchers disagree on which bad smells are important.
To evaluate the likelihood that a code reorganization to address bad code smells will yield improvement in the defect-proneness of the code we introduce XTREE, a tool that analyzes a historical log of defects seen previously in the code and generates a set of useful code changes.
Any bad smell that requires changes outside of that set can be deprioritized (since there is no historical evidence that the bad smell causes any problems).
Code modules that are changed in response to XTREE's recommendations contain significantly fewer defects than recommendations from previous studies. Further, XTREE endorses changes to very few code metrics, and the bad smell recommendations (learned from previous studies) are not universal to all software projects.
Before undertaking a code reorganization based on a bad smell report, use a tool like XTREE to check and ignore any such operations that are useless; i.e. ones which lack evidence in the historical record that it is useful to make that change. Note that this use case applies to both manual code reorganizations proposed by developers as well as those conducted by automatic methods. This recommendation assumes that there is an historical record. If none exists, then the results of this paper could be used as a guide.
