|
|
|
An Interview with Tom Copeland of PMD
|
Article Topics
Introduction · Maven · The Future Page 2 of 3
Maven
Stelligent: At one point, PMD migrated from Ant to Maven- how was the process? How do you feel about Maven?
Tom: Well, we mainly use Maven for generating the web site; I still use an Ant script for compiling and running tests and whatnot. But I think some of the other fellows are using Maven for their daily work.
Maven's great for hooking everything together on the site, and we have Jelly scripts to parse the rule XML files and generate HTML from them. Nifty! The Maven console is pretty cool too; it makes running goals a lot faster.
Stelligent: Tell us more about the PMD Store- what is it? Does it make money?
Tom: This is something my company - InfoEther
- just started. The idea is that some corporate developers will want to
purchase a sort of support contract to ensure they get timely answers
to any questions they have about the PMD plugin for JDeveloper. We just started it, but we have high hopes for it.
Stelligent: You were awarded the "Open source Developer of the Year" in 2003- how did you get picked? What was that like?
Tom: That was due to the PMD
JDeveloper plugin; apparently some folks liked it and nominated me. The
Oracle magazine guys came out and did an interview and took some
pictures and sent a nice plaque and all that. It was a big surprise and
a very nice thing.
Stelligent: What can you tell us about what you've heard about how organizations are incorporating PMD into their development processes?
Tom: Hmm. Hard to say. The feedback I usually get is like "PMD is great!" or "PMD helped us fix a lot of problems in our code!"
Stelligent: What benefits do people bring up most frequently?
Tom: Mainly just the digging up of little problems that creep into the code over time... an if block's contents getting commented out and things like that. It's just nice to have a tool check for those sorts of things.
Stelligent: Are there some features that you sense are more heavily used than others?
Tom: Hmm. I think the Ant task is pretty popular, and the Eclipse plugin seems to be downloaded a lot. Also, the copy/paste detector gets some nice comments.
|
|
