[Bluej-discuss] New BlueJ extension - PMD

[Tom Copeland]

Hi all -

Here's a new extension for BlueJ.  It's a wrapper for the open source
code analysis utility PMD [1], which finds unused code, empty blocks,
and all that sort of thing.  

Here are some screenshots of it in action - first the menu item it adds:

http://infoether.com/~tom/bluej_pmd_menu_item.png

and the report it creates - it found a few problems with "Foo":

http://infoether.com/~tom/bluej_pmd_report.png

Of course, it's very clunky at this point, but you get the idea -
students will create code that has basic problems like unused variables
and whatnot, and PMD will find those for them.  Right now the extension
only checks the "basic" [2] and "unused code" [3] PMD rules.

More interesting would be:

- something integrated into the editor, so that when a student typed in
some code it would be highlighted if it violated a coding rule

- if displayed in a separate window, the problems should be clickable
(click on the problem, editor jumps to the source code)

Here's the first release - it's just the PMDExtension.jar file that you
can download and drop in your bluej/lib/extensions/ directory:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=56262&package_id=169167

Questions/comments/suggestions are welcome!

Yours,

Tom

[1] http://pmd.sf.net/
[2] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/rules/basic.html
[3] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/rules/unusedcode.html