Checkstyle vs. PMD

Question

We are introducing static analysis tools into the build system for our Java product. We are using Maven2 so Checkstyle and PMD integration come for free. However it looks li

Answer 1

Checkstyle and PMD both are good at checking coding standards and are easy to extend. But PMD has additional rules to check for cyclomatic complexity,Npath complexity,etc which allows you write healthy code.

Another advantage of using PMD is CPD (Copy/Paste Detector).It finds out code duplication across projects and is not constrained to JAVA.It works for JSP too. Neal Ford has a good presentation on Metrics Driven Agile Development, which talks about many tools that are helpful for Java/Java EE Development