CodeHaus hosted a simple Macker MOJO. (Read what the plugin is supposed to do here.) It was still in the MOJO sandbox and had not been released. Here is a clone of this Maven Macker MOJO. It contains all the original Subversion history together with some changes a lot of changes.
Macker is a build-time architectural rule checking utility for Java developers. It's meant to model the architectural rules and helps to keep code clean and consistent. You can tailor a rules file to suit the structure of a specific project. Writing a rules file is part of the development process for each unique project. Macker was originally developed by Paul Cantrell. (This introduction is an excerpt from the Macker FAQ.)
Macker is quite old, but we have been using it for years and it works well for us. See what happens if you do not use it. It comes with Ant support, but Maven integration has been lacking and Maven integration is available as well.
- See the current usage page of Macker Maven plugin's Maven site.
The CodeHaus Maven Macker plugin only supports a very basic configuration. For example, there is no way to skip it's execution or to allow multiple rule-set files. I added more configuration options, e.g.
- Skip execution (
<skip>). - Work on test classes as well (
<includeTests>). - Allow multiple rule-set files.
- Find rules in the classpath.
- Include and exclude files.
In fact, this is everything the Maven PMD plugin is able to do and I copied the source from there ;-) Further more I added the following:
- Some unit test cases for old and new functionality.
- Made the whole thing Java 1.4 compatible to fix dependency problems.
- It now skips the execution of the plugin for projects which are not Java, so it skips POM projects.
- I fixed the
classesDirectoryproblem with Sonar. - Added the missing examples page to the Maven site. I copied it from the current site, but it wasn't in the SVN trunk.
- Fixed all PMD and almost all Checkstyle errors shown in the site report.
- Had to change all license headers to the current Checkstyle format.
Later, Mark noticed some license problems: Macker is only GPL (without the classpath exception) and must not be called from an ASL licensed plugin, but only with a forked JVM command-line as is done in the Cobertura plugin. So, I did the following:
- Refactored the plugin to allow different implementations of calling Macker.
- Added a forking implementation, which was mainly copied from the Cobertura plugin.
- Finally, I added some integration tests, which set-up I borrowed from the Eclipse plugin. See my post about Maven plugin testing for more details on using the Maven Plugin Testing Tools.
A 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT of my latest changes is available in my Mvn2Repo. There is also a 0.9.0 unofficial release which does not fork Macker. For the current state of the patch see ticket MOJO-1529. The plugin has not been released.