Groovy Code Analysis Tool

[Day, Chuck]

We are looking for feedback on a Grails Plugin named CodeNarc(http://www.grails.org/plugin/codenarc).  We were interested in a way to help both with standardizing our code and to more easily enforce coding best-practices.  Please reply with any experiences and/or lessons-learned that may be helpful.  Otherwise, any suggestions for a different static code analysis tool for Groovy? 

 

Thank you.

Chuck

 

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[Hamlet D'Arcy]

My experiences with CodeNarc are mixed. Also, I'm one of the
developers so this might be biased.

About a year ago I tried CodeNarc. At the time it was just *sort of*
useful. Most of the rules were around naming conventions or obvious
errors. Many of the problems it reported were stuff I didn't care
about, and the IntelliJ IDEA inspections were far superior for finding
bugs. But CodeNarc has changed a lot in the last year and a lot of new
rules have been added. I wrote up an unofficial guide to the latest
release here: http://www.canoo.com/blog/2010/11/13/groovy-codenarc-0-11-unofficial-guide/.
There are a whole bunch of concurrency related rules now, as well as
dead code analysis and other interesting rules.

I use Groovy mostly in mixed Java/Groovy projects. (If you have a
Grails project for me then let me know :) ). Many of the rules in the
product today are focused on writing idiomatic Groovy code. When we're
doing code reviews and we spot a problem ("Hey, you should really use
a spread" or "don't call plus() just use +") then we add it as a rule
to the product. As such, the ruleset focuses sometimes more on proper
Groovy usage rather than catching bugs.

CodeNarc does not run in an IDE except as an external tool using the
command line interface. It can be run as a JUnit test, which is an
easy way to integrate it into your build with no fuss and no build
configuration. False positives can be ignored using the
@SuppressWarnings annotation and all rules can be configured.

I think you should try CodeNarc. Codenarc 0.12 is going to be released
in a week or two. Our biggest issue right now deciding on the new
logo. You can imagine how this conversation has gone.

If you want IDE support, a larger ruleset, and rules focused on
finding bugs then use IntelliJ IDEA. The IDEA inspections can be run
from the command line with a valid .ipr or .idea project file, so they
can be used in the IDE and the build.

Thanks,

--
Hamlet D'Arcy
haml...@gmail.com

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