Question

I am working on a project where we have many JSF pages – using the XHTML format.
We monitor the quality of our code using Sonar (and thus Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs…). This works great for the Java part of our application.

Now, I want to have a tool (ideally something that could then be linked to Sonar by writing my own plugin) that checks the XHTML part of my application.

So, is there a checkstyle-like tool that can check for some rules on my pages? For example, this tool will raise a warning when I encounter these kind of code:

<h:inputText ...></h:inputText> (instead of <h:inputText .../>)

or :

<h:panelGrid columns="1">
     ...
</h:panelGrid> (a <h:panelGroup> is better here)

I’m aware that Checkstyle offers a rule that is based on a regular expression, but I fear that solution is too complex for some rules…

Answer 1

I’ve recently found the Sonar Web plugin that provides static code analysis of JSP and JSF files. The main features of this plugin are:

• sizing (files, lines of code)
• rules compliancy
• complexity
• duplication
• comments

I will try it soon (I need to install the latest Sonar 2.2 version) and give feedbacks.