Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-in

Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-in is a comprehensive and reliable piece of software whose main purpose resides in providing developers with the ability of constantly verifying that the code they are writing in Eclipse IDE adheres to the standard.

By working with this tool, programmers are spared from the task of manually checking their code for issues, as Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-in automates and performs the tasks on its own, verifying numerous aspects pertaining to the source code.

As such, it can look into class design and method design issues, also checking the code layout or any formatting problems that may arise. The performed checks apply to the Java coding style in general, so there are not additional libraries required for this tasks. However, since Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-in is very easily customized, it can support almost any standard of coding

The most prominent source code standard checks include ‘Annotations’ ( such as the style of the annotations, deprecated annotations, missing overrides, suppress warnings), or ‘Block Checks’ (for instance checking for empty blocks, left and right curly braces or finding nested blocks).

Moreover, with Eclipse Checkstyle Plug-in, programmers can verify ‘Class Design’ (namely ‘VisibilityModifier’, ‘FinalClass’, ‘InterfaceIsType’, ‘HideUtilityClassConstructor’, ‘DesignForExtension’, ‘ThrowsCount’, etc), as well as ‘Coding’ issues (‘ArrayTrailingComma’, ‘CovariantEquals’, ‘EmptyStatement’, ‘EqualsAvoidNull’, ‘IllegalInstntiation’, ‘MagicNumber’, ‘SimplifyBooleanReturn’ and others).

What can also be checked comprises ‘Headers’, ‘Imports’ (like ‘AvoidStarImport’, ‘IllegalImport’, ‘UnusedImports’ or ‘CustomImportOrder’) ‘Javadoc Comments’(such as ‘JavadocType’, ‘JavadocPackage’ or ‘JavadocVariable’) ‘Metrics’, (for instance ‘BooleanExpressionComplexity’, ‘ClassFanOutComplexity’ or ‘JavaNCSS’), ‘Modifiers’, (‘ModifierOrder’ or ‘RedundantModifier’), ‘Naming Conventions’ and ‘Regexp’, as well as many others, a full list being available on its homepage.