There is often some misunderstanding when people talk about coding rules engines. Everyone tries to take position in favor of his preferred tool and does his best to explain what are the weaknesses of the other ones. For instance, a PMD supporter could say :

“Checkstyle is a stupid tool consuming time to search for tab characters when PMD is a smart one that can do the job alone as a good soldier, Findbugs is very good for resource consumption and Macker is … uh, what is Macker ? “

Time to breathe ! There is in fact no need to take such position since those tools are not competing but are complementary and should be used simultaneously as it is the case in Sonar. Each of them is mainly targeting a certain type of coding rules : conventions (Checkstyle), bad practices (PMD) and potential bugs (FindBugs).

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