PMD VS Error Prone

PMD is a source code static analysis tool. It inspects your Java files for any issues, and has a configurable set of rules to look at.

While the security findings can be pretty elaborate and helpful, the code quality and performance focused findings are not that impressive and can often be detected by more basic or powerful tools like SonarQube (paying) or PMD (free). To see what I mean you can have a look at the list of Java code quality detectors, which is pretty short and contains a lot of simple findings like:

Also saw this convo has a couple years worth of ideas going on … https://github.com/pmd/pmd/issues/3413

PMD and Checkstyle are static analysis tools that check your code on each project build. Gradle allows to apply them easily.

The generated classes should be put into .gitignore. Otherwise, if you have Checkstyle, PMD, or SonarQube in your project, then generated classes can violate some rules. Besides, if you don't put them into .gitignore, then each pull request might become huge due to the fact that even a slightest fix can lead to lots of changes in the generated classes.

- PMD Static Code Analysis tool: https://pmd.github.io/

PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)

PMD, and checkstyle as well.

Open up the config/ruleset.xml file, and you’ll find an XML document that lists several rules. These rules map to the issues which PMD will report on. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of Apex rules, and you can find the full set at the PMD repo. You have complete control over which rules to enable. Typically, you’d determine which ones are important by agreeing with your teammates on the ones that matter most. After all, their code will be statically analyzed, too!

error-prone is good for some extra static analysis.

A special kind of validation is enforcing that record fields are not null. (Un)fortunately, records do not have any special behavior regarding nullability. You can use tools like NullAway or Error Prone to prevent null in your code in general, or you can add checks to your records:

I am all in favour to more third side libraries adding functionalities, like Lombok, Manifold and error prone. As well as smaller projects like this shameless plug and what appears in this list

If only Google didn't suck when it came to Java9+ support... https://github.com/google/error-prone/issues/2649

I haven't used it. I use Google's ErrorProne + Lombok to prevent NPEs in java.

Take a look at NullAway, a plugin for Error Prone.

For some of this stuff, there are compiler extensions that allow extra type checking to be added e.g. Google Error-Prone: https://github.com/google/error-prone with stuff like: https://errorprone.info/bugpattern/ReturnMissingNullable.

Doesn't help you with third party libraries, but across an org applying that rule (and others!) typically ensures some consistency.

How to build a static analysis plugin. Google has a framework for Java with a good tutorial.