How many times have you, in your developer life, smacked our head and screamed "that was sooo obvious!" upon discovering a bug ? And how many times those were pretty simple bugs that could have been caught just by looking closely at the code and finding a silly mistake ? I'm guessing too many times.... :-)
PMD, no real meaning to the acronym (see here), is a pretty handy tool that if used with some frequency can help you at least save your head from the smacking. PMD is a Java code analysis tool that draws from an experience-driven rule set to look into your code and flag possible mistakes. From unused imports to the always error prone braceless if statement, PMD can give you a pretty good coverage of what you can do to improve your code and reduce the probability of making a silly mistake.
PMD can be run from within your ant or maven build file should you want to make running it part of your build process. You can find plugins for most of the popular IDEs to make it even simpler to run it and enhance your code.
PMD is extensible letting you add your rules should you wish to enforce any kind of rule to your project.
Finally, PMD is open sourced, licensed under a BSD-style license and available at sourceforge.
All in all a pretty cool and valuable tool to improve your development process and maybe keep your development team a bit saner.
Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra! Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at Scribe did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...
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