Sabotage Your Code with Time Bombs

Sometimes you need some code for a short period of time, after which
it needs to be removed.  I've been having to do that a lot in the past
few weeks.  If I'm an average developer, then the average developer
has, at one time or another, done this by putting in comments like:

// XXX HACK FIXME TODO remove this!!!

The problem with this is you write it and then forget about it.  It
gets lost in the bazillions of other auto-generated TODO comments.
Granted, an above average developer doesn't tolerate all those
auto-generated TODO comments.  But then, by definition, most of the
developers in the world are average.  Like me.

The point is, it gets forgotten, and many times you never go back to
make the fix.  Well in a case I ran into this week, I had to be
absolutely certain that this time, it couldn't slip through the
cracks.

The solution?  TimeBomb.

It looks like this:

TimeBomb.explodeAt(11, 1, 2010, "Remove the following line or else...");

The explodeAt method checks the current system date, and if it's past
the date you've given it, will throw a java.lang.RuntimeException with
the message you provide in the last argument.

It's easy to ignore a TODO comment. Not so easy to ignore a broken app.

Oh, and I'm not showing the implementation, because if you can't
implement that, then you aren't (or shouldn't be) writing Java code to
begin with.