Zap bugs with PMD

PMD, an open source static analysis tool, can be a worthwhile addition to your bug-zapping arsenal. Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how to use PMD's built-in rules and your own custom rule sets to improve the quality of your Java code. Tom Copeland's PMD is an open source (BSD license) tool that analyzes Java source code to find potential bugs. It's similar in general purpose to tools like FindBugs and Lint4j (see Resources).

However, all of these tools tend to find different bugs, so it's profitable to run each of them across any given code base. In this article, I'll explain how to use PMD and show you what to expect from it. This article explores PMD's command-line interface. You can also integrate PMD with Ant for automatic source-code checking, and plug-ins exist for most major IDEs and programmer's editors.