PMD source code analyzer

https://pmd.github.io/

by BuuQu9hu • 10 years ago

70 34 10 years ago

pmd.github.io

Wow, crazy to see this project still alive and thriving. I was using it 10+ years ago when I worked exclusively in Java. It was great to find those "obvious" issues that slip in that you didn't notice when you should of. I think I had it as a SVN pre-commit hook at one point.

In fact, the lead dev wrote a book "PMD Applied" and I wrote a review of it: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/book-review-pmd-applied

It's since been implemented in PHP too: https://phpmd.org/

blater• 10 years ago

yeah, nice to see PMD still getting some love. A very well implemented tool that just does what it does awesomely well.

tcopeland2• 10 years ago

I remember you writing that, thanks Keith!

bastijn• 10 years ago

Since it is not on the front page and probably everybody wants to know. Here is what it claims to do.

"PMD scans source code in Java and other languages and looks for potential problems like:

- Possible bugs - empty try/catch/finally/switch statements

- Dead code - unused local variables, parameters and private methods

- Suboptimal code - wasteful String/StringBuffer usage Overcomplicated expressions - unnecessary if statements, for loops that could be while loops

- Duplicate code - copied/pasted code means copied/pasted bugs"

[0] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/snapshot/

tcopeland2• 10 years ago

At one point Sven Jacob added some data flow analysis. It was interesting stuff; I feel like we could have taken that a lot further. But anyhow, the combination of PMD and FindBugs can find quite a few bugs that would be hard to track down otherwise.

rickette• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why this is on the frontpage since PMD (like Checkstyle and FindBugs) has been around for years. Still If your not familiar with PMD you should take a look. Anyway these days you probably want to invest in setting up SonarQube which is a superior tool in many ways (multi-language code analysis with webbassd dashboard etc)

nradov• 10 years ago

Yes agreed. FindBugs appears to be kind of defunct anyway; there hasn't been a release since 2015 and the main developer isn't working on it any more. SonarSource has been gradually dropping the PMD and FindBugs rules from SonarQube and writing their own replacements.

Ace17• 10 years ago

Some usage examples on the front page would have been nice.

xvilka• 10 years ago

I wonder how it's comparable with Infer [1].

1. https://github.com/facebook/infer

mmrezaie2• 10 years ago

I rarely write a bad code, just joking! But has anyone used the emacs plug-in for it? And is it any good?

adtac7• 10 years ago

FWIW we have an emacs plugin[1] for coala, which supports PMD.

[1] https://github.com/coala/coala-emacs

mmrezaie2• 10 years ago

Very interesting. I never used anything like pmd and I thought these tools are only available with advanced IDEs.

underyx2• 10 years ago

Here's a shameless plug for https://coala.io/ which is a sort of a meta-linter — coala can run PMD on your code along with ~100 other linters and code checkers.

thecupisblue• 10 years ago

Oh wow! Awesome, gonna try it out today on my Android project, didn't know it existed!

zellyn• 10 years ago

If you're a Go programmer, there's a Go-specific metalinter: https://github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter

underyx2• 10 years ago

This seems especially useful when you don't want to think about how to set up linting, and what rules you want to use. There's a similar tool for Python, called prospector: https://github.com/landscapeio/prospector

With coala you need to configure which linters run on which files, and we recognize this as a thing we can improve upon. We're soon going to ship a feature which will allow configuration to just specify where the files are (e.g. 'src/*.py') and what aspects to check (e.g. 'syntax,smells,duplication,security'). Then coala will decide which tools are appropriate, get them from pip/npm/wherever, and run them.

epage• 10 years ago

Well, I guess I don't need to worry about open sourcing my meta linter but instead look into adopting this.

Drat, I liked the name "Red Herring".

BuuQu9hu8• 10 years ago

Another meta-linter:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/check-all-the-t...

adtac7• 10 years ago

Actually, coala is not entirely a meta-linter - we have a few native linters that we wrote ourselves too. However, a large chunk is external linters.

TeMPOraL2• 10 years ago

I've checked out Coala, I've been using FindBugs and SonarQube in the past, and sadly, all of the solutions I've seen miss support for Lisp language family. I could use some kind of linter for my Common Lisp code.

sils• 10 years ago

Hey, would it help you if we were to include https://github.com/fukamachi/sblint in coala? Do you know other tools? We could easily integrate them using https://api.coala.io/en/latest/Developers/Writing_Linter_Bea... if there's concrete interest

TeMPOraL2• 10 years ago

There was "Lisp critic" file floating around, but I've lost track of it. I don't know of any other tools.

I haven't used the one you linked to yet (thanks for the link!). Seems like it could be useful.

PMD source code analyzer

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