cats VS Spotbugs

Out of this frustration I've built: https://github.com/Endava/cats. It's for APIs, but mostly addressing exactly this case: don't use strings for everything, if you choose to use it though, make sure you add patterns for checking if things are valid, make sure you think about all the corner cases and all the weird characters that can brake you app, and so on.

If the API has an OpenAPI spec available, you can use: https://github.com/Endava/cats

This is why we need better tools which will give benefits for the added complexity. If you need to create both the feature files AND the code, it's just complexity with little benefits. But frameworks like https://github.com/karatelabs/karate or https://github.com/Endava/cats are hiding this complexity and remove the code layer entirely. Which, in my view, this is where you need to be in 2023, particularly for API testing.

I've built a tool specifically to test if these kind of characters will reach API backends: https://github.com/Endava/cats. My idea was that APIs should explicitly reject or sanitise input containing such characters.

Cats by Endava

SpotBugs is a great tool for static code analysis. Recently I got two similar warnings in one of the codebases I work on and I had to fix it.

SpotBugs is pretty good.

PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)

While at it you could also point them to static code analyzers such as error_prone, spotbugs and pmd (use all 3 at once - they complement each other in detecting different issues).

First, it's better to use SpotBugs 4.4.1 and above, that includes a fix to make SARIF report compatible with Github code scanning API requirements.

RUN wget https://github.com/spotbugs/spotbugs/releases/download/4.4.1/spotbugs-4.4.1.tgz

If you don’t have checkmarx/Vera code money, have you looked at https://find-sec-bugs.github.io/? It can be used with a few things such as https://spotbugs.github.io/ and sonarQ