----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are things which really should be done, but just haven't been gotten to yet. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- o Enhance Rule Designer to allow testing of the violation suppress Regex and XPath. o Remove the type resolution specific rules. Merge these back into the standard rules. In general, a Rule should use TR when it can, and fall back on non-TR approach otherwise. No need for separate Rules for TR/non-TR. o Reconcile the util.designer and util.viewer packages. Two versions of the same thing. Designer is more up to date, but Viewer has a nice MVC design. o Need a JUnit test to check for "dead" Rules, that is those not used by any RuleSet. o Rule JUnit tests should verify the Test class follows expected naming conventions just like the Rules need to. o Do we have a rule to style check for multiple declarations and chained assignments? (e.g. int a, b; int a = b = x;) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are food for thought, perhaps future items. If you think you'd like to work on one of these, check with pmd-devel to see what the current thoughts on the topic ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- o CPD needs work on use of Language. It currently is hardcoded to only handled Java 1.4. Integrate CPD needs into core PMD where appropriate. Otherwise, drive CPD behavior based off of core PMD, instead of duplicating some logic. o Need a more flexible and powerful scheme for classifying files to various Languages. At a minimum, should have the ability to specify which file extensions you want to be used for a language (e.g. not everyone uses .jsp for JSP extensions, some use .jspx, .xhtml, etc.). Also, consider hooks into the LanguageVersionDiscoverer process for classifying a File/String to a LanguageVersion of a specific Language, one could imaging using a 'magic' system like Unix uses to tell different versions of files apart based on actual content. o Should we change Node interface to something like 'Node>', and then declare the language specific node interfaces to be something like 'JavaNode extends Node'? This could allow anything on the Node interface to return the language specific node type instead of generic node. For example, ASTStatement.jjtGetParent() to return a JavaNode, instead of a Node. This is a rather huge change, as the Node interface is one of the pervasive things in the PMD code base. Is the extra work of using the Node interface with properly with generics, worth the omission of occasional some casting? o Should multiple Languages be able to claim a single source file? Imagine XML format JSP file, for which you've defined a ruleset which uses JSP and XML rules. Stating that certain XML rules also can map to the JSP language extensions could be useful. This means Source file to LanguageVersion mapping is not 1-1, but 1-many, we'd need to deal with this accordingly. o Additional changes to Rule organization within RuleSets as discussed on this forum thread: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1323593&forum_id=188194 o Figure out a way to allow Rules to deal with parentheses and blocks, which introduce certain repetitive (and generally ignorable for most Rules) structures into the AST tree. Some rules are making special effort (e.g. ConfusingTernaryRule) to detect these AST patterns. Perhaps a "normalized" AST structure can be created which will make the AST appear consistent regardless of how many parens are presented, or how many blocks have been created (e.g. default block inserted, duplicates collapsed). This should be configurable on per Rule basis similar to TR and SymbolTable.