On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 10:35 +0100, Michael Stevens wrote:
> On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 02:16:51PM +0530, Hari prasanna wrote:
> > Hi ,
> >
> > I am new to the usage of static code analysis tools. I want to know the
> > difference between PMD and Find Bugs.
> >
> > and How is one advantageous over the other?
>
> As someone who uses them without detailed understanding, I'd say they
> complement each other - PMD finds interesting things that findbugs doesn't,
> and findbugs finds things that PMD doesn't. I think it's a good idea to use
> both.
>
> At a more technical level, as far as I know PMD does a fairly lightweight
> scan at a source level, whereas findbugs does more detailed analysis of the
> compiled bytecode. But I could be wrong.
Yup, right on, PMD operates on source code using a JavaCC-generated
parser while FindBugs works on bytecode via BCEL. Also, FindBugs is way
ahead - it does a lot of good stuff (like data flow analysis) that PMD
doesn't do yet.
Yours,
Tom Copeland
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