Seamlessly integrates PMD into your NetBeans IDE
Elegance always matters, especially when creating software.
However, a universal definition of such an ambitious goal seems to be fairly difficult, if not impossible, as different programmers adopt different styles.
PMD is a Java library/tool allowing you to scan your code and detecting violations of the rules that you requested to enforce: this introduces a great deal of flexibility, in particular if you consider that you can both use a wide range of predefined rules and write your own rules: for example, the predefined ruleset rulesets/unusedcode.xml will make PMD scan your source files for unused private fields, unused private methods, unused local variables and so on. Of course, you can instruct PMD to use multiple rulesets simultaneously.
PMD can be run both as a library and as a standalone program, and several excellent IDE plugins are now available, some of which target NetBeans: EasyPmd is designed as an open source plugin for NetBeans which seamlessly integrates the PMD scanning engine into NetBeans, by making PMD violation reports automatically appear both in the Action items window and in the editor: you just have to specify the scanning scope (current file, main project, all projects) in the Action items window.
The current major version provides a simplified, more elegant architecture, based on Helios, and profiles, to let you easily switch between multiple configurations.
The overall build process is based on Maven 3, for elegance and robustness.
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Includes PMD 5, compatible with Java 8.
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Fully-refactored, much better and faster architecture, relying on Helios and Maven 3.
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Automatically runs PMD on the files of your current task scope (selected in the Action items window).
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Reports every PMD violation both in the Action Items window and in the editor's side bar.
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Option field for setting PMD's auxiliary classpath
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Supports profiles: you can easily change the plugin's options simply by changing the active profile.
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Glyphs of different colors for different priorities: ranging from full green to full red - according to the priority of the rule that is is bound to each violation.
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Priority filtering: in the configuration dialog, one can choose the minimum priority level that PMD will consider when applying rules.
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Optional priority label in task descriptions: each violation in the Action items window shows its priority by default - one can therefore sort violations just by clicking the Description header.
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Includes a copy of PMD, for a safer and much faster execution.
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Robustness: most execution errors, should they occur, are caught and reported in the tasks list, without crashing the plugin.
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Integrated cache: to ensure maximum speed and avoid repeated scans, EasyPmd features a cache which is also persisted to a HyperSQL local db, so it is available even after you restart NetBeans.
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You can extensively customize EasyPmd and the underlying PMD engine via a user-friendly options dialog.
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Smart options: if you change options that only affect data visualization, the engine and its cache are not affected
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Custom path filtering (including and excluding paths), based on regular expressions.
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Predefined, customizable regular expressions, to simplify path filtering.
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XML, human-readable options stored in the user's home directory
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Online help, integrated into the NetBeans help system.
EasyPmd requires NetBeans 8+ and Java 8+.
EasyPmd can be easily installed from within NetBeans, as explained in the tutorials below.
Alternatively, you can download the .nbm files from GitHub or from the NetBeans Plugin Portal.
Special thanks to (ordered by surname):
- Ross Goldberg
- Matthew Harrison
- Thomas Kellerer
- Wes McKean
- Diogo Mendes
- Jeremy Pyman
- Christian Funder Sommerlund
- Toru Takahashi
- Thomas Wolf