Just comitted a proposal for a major refactoring to PMD

[Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>]

Hi,


As I found out that FlexPMD contains a major amount of duplicate logic of the PMD project and our version being extremely out of date, I thought about adding Flex support to PMD. As PMD didn't allow externally extending rules and I didn't think moving FlexPMD to the PMD project, I discussed some ways to make PMD extendable on the List. As they were pretty unresponsive, I forked the PMD project and implemented a refactored version at https://github.com/chrisdutz/pmd


Actually this version should function identically to the PMD version, but we are now able to create a jar containing a file META-INF/pmd-language.properties in which we can list additional LanguageModules that are dynamically added to PMD by adding them to the classpath.


My idea was that instead of maintaining a parallel version of PMD and the Maven plugin, we could now simply contribute a new language to PMD and not have to care about maintaining the infrastructure.


If the PMD project accepts my solution or something similar I would suggest to refactor FlexPMD to work with that PMD version and drop the rest ...


What do you think? If you like the change and think it's the way to go, perhaps a few more people asking for that change in the PMD list could speed up things :-)


Chris