Hi,
I don't know too much about the corresponding Maven2 plugins and in which phase of the lifecycle they normally operate, but I have a very knowledgeable colleague who also did our Hudson setup. So I can easily get all the needed information. I agree that it does not make sense to run those reports with every build. It takes time and consumes resources. In Hudson we do have a special documentation job accompanying each build job which by default runs only once a day. From my perspective this is totally sufficient to collect quality metrics and let tools check for bad practice and bug patterns. The integration in Hudson is therefore useful, as it offers a very convenient way to obtain those reports and also important check the trend conveniently. The tricky part is the selection/configuration of rules/rulesets to apply. My suggestion: start with a rather small set and increase it incrementally. The same configuration as used in CI should be used inside the IDE with the respective plugins. Most favourite IDEs have nowadays rather sufficient support for those tools. Regards, Eric ________________________________ From: Ruwan Linton [mailto:ruwan.lin...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 10:33 PM To: dev@synapse.apache.org Subject: Re: Offer to support Synapse development I too agree with Eric here, though they seem to be doing the same thing, each of these have it's own focuses and I would like to see all three reports. Thanks Eric for the nice explanation. So, how are we planning to execute this? Are we going to use the respective maven plugins, if so I would suggest using a different profile for these reports without affecting the normal build flow. AFAIK, these reports are generated at the reporting phase of the maven execution, but of course FindBugs and PMD comes at the compile phase to collect the information to be presented in the report. Thanks, Ruwan On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 2:31 AM, Hubert, Eric <eric.hub...@foxmobile.com> wrote: > Cool! > > Now, probably it doesn't make sense to use both PMD and findbugs, > especially if we use annotations to suppress specific warnings. Do you > have an idea which one is better? >From my personal experiences this is not true. It makes sense to use both of them in parallel, because although there is in fact some overlapping, they have strength and weaknesses in different areas. It is possible to configure them in a way to reduce the overlapping (not suppressing rules in code, but exclude some rules from the applied ruleset of each tool). Overall PMD is a bit more useful in CI where Findbugs can also help if executed on demand. Findbugs detects bugs, which PMD can't (bytecode versus source code analysis). Number of false positives is higher for Findbugs. A while back a colleague prepared a presentation. One picture was quite useful to demonstrate the different focus of those tools. I attached it to the mail. Hope it comes through... Actually we ended up integrating Checkstyle, PMD and Findbugs in CI. Additionally to the picture here some of my experiences regarding the strength/weaknesses of the tools: Checkstyle ---------- Focus: CONVENTIONS Naming, code format, consistence code/JavaDoc, design suggestions Pro: + good for big, distributed teams to achieve style consistency + some design metrics are pretty useful to improve the code (decrease complexity) Contra: - configuration always necessary - if used in conjunction with code formatter, rules need to be adjusted to avoid conflicts - if a project has been setup without checkstyle right from the beginning, IDE integration can be painful due to too many violations "for peanuts" (whitespace problems, tab instead of space etc.); rules should then be applied stepwise PMD --- Focus: AVOID BAD PRACTICES Identifies useless control flow, find missing freeing of resources, suggestions for performance improvements, identifies redundant checks etc. Pro: + very good explanation of each violation (including reasoning and hints to do it better + grouping of rules to rulesets + highly customizable (rules in editable xml) + extendable (Java/XML knowledge needed) Contra: - depending on the ruleset, PMD can also output a great number of warnings Findbugs -------- Focus: FIND POTENTIAL BUGS Pro: + identifies real bugs (NPE, Death Store, multithreading problems due to wrong synchronization) Contra: - number of false positives (problems with compile optimizations, dependency injection etc.) Very interesting is also what's going on in the sonar open source project: http://sonar.codehaus.org/ Here you can find something in action: http://nemo.sonar.codehaus.org/ They also think that all the above tools are valuable and try to integrate their results. They have also a Hudson plugin available, but I did not find time to investigate: http://sonar.codehaus.org/a-new-hudson-plugin-for-a-closer-integration-w ith-sonar/ Regards, Eric --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@synapse.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@synapse.apache.org -- Ruwan Linton Senior Software Engineer & Product Manager; WSO2 ESB; http://wso2.org/esb WSO2 Inc.; http://wso2.org email: ru...@wso2.com; cell: +94 77 341 3097 blog: http://ruwansblog.blogspot.com
