Product Reviews
SSW Code Auditor 1.22
We all like to write perfect code. But being overworked developers, we
don't always manage to do so. That's where SSW Code Auditor comes in.
Designed to inspect web sites, it can review ASP, ASPX, and HTML pages
for consisteny with standards. Whose standards? Well, SSW includes a few
suggested rules (tags required, tags disallowed, and so on), but it's
up to you to define what your own standards for web pages are. This is
done through specifying regular expressions that are either required or
forbidden on the pages in your site. SSW Code Auditor makes this much
easier for novices by including a wizard to build and test regular expressions
for you -- that alone is worth the price of the tool if you're struggling
with regex's.
You can also define exceptions to the rules (pages that you know should
be ignored) and even (be careful!) replacement expressions, making this
a fix-up tool as well as an auditing one. It'll also run HTML Tidy on
your pages, turning up even more nitpicky errors, if you want.
I gave the tool a spin on a couple of web sites, including one with nearly
10,000 files. The latter took it a few minutes, but it didn't choke, and
at the end I had more errors on my pages than I could shake a stick at
(I'm a pretty sloppy web coder).
SSW Code Auditor stores jobs in a database, so you can re-run them at
any time; that's useful for a web site under development. Reports are
HTML. You can get more information and a trial version at http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/codeauditor/,
or purchase the full version for $199.
[This review originally appeared in
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.