Monday, May 26, 2008

Checkstyle

Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code to spare humans of this boring (but important) task. This makes it ideal for projects that want to enforce a coding standard.

Checkstyle is highly configurable and can be made to support almost any coding standard. An example configuration file is supplied supporting the Sun Code Conventions. As well, other sample configuration files are supplied for other well known conventions.

Checkstyle can check many aspects of your source code. Historically it's main functionality has been to check code layout issues, but since the internal architecture was changed in version 3, more and more checks for other purposes have been added. Now Checkstyle provides checks that find class design problems, duplicate code, or bug patterns like double checked locking.

The latest release of Checkstyle can be downloaded from the SourceForge download page.

If you want to live on the bleeding edge, you can checkout the current development code from Subversion and compile yourself.

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