Xavier Le Vourch has released PMD 4.1 rc1! PMD is a Java code analysis utility that includes a bunch of rules and makes it easy to write custom rules to meet your needs.

This release has a whopping 14 new rules, including some EJB sanity checks like DoNotCallSystemExit and StaticEJBFieldShouldBeFinal, a design ruleset addition with EmptyMethodInAbstractClassShouldBeAbstract, and a check for a specific embedded literal type with AvoidUsingHardCodedIP.

PMD 4.1rc1 includes a pile of bug fixes and features. False positives have been eliminated from BooleanInstantiation, UnusedPrivateField, SingularField, and various other rules. CloneMethodMustImplementCloneable no longer throws exceptions when checking enums. There's a new "nicehtml" renderer, Jaxen has been upgraded to 1.1.1, and CPD's Ruby support is better.

Xavier, Allan, Wouter, and Romain have also made good progress on type resolution... but I'll write that up in another post. Go PMD! And of course, go PMD book! Now a mere $20.