There are several ways to do code quality checks in SOA Suite. In this blog post I will describe a minimal effort setup which uses Jenkins 2.9, SonarQube 5.6 and the SonarQube XML Plugin 1.4.1. SonarQube is a popular tool to check and visualize code quality. An XML Plugin is available for SonarQube which allows you to define custom XPath rules. At the end of this post I will shortly describe several other options which you can consider to help you improve code quality by doing automated checks.
Using SonarQube and the XML Plugin to do code quality checks on SOA Suite components has several benefits compared to other options described at the end of this post.
- It is very flexible and relatively technology independent. It allows you to scan any XML file such as BPEL, BPMN, OSB, Mediator, Spring, composite.xml files
- It requires only configuration of SonarQube, the SonarQube XML Plugin and the CI solution (Jenkins in this example)
- It has few dependencies. It does not require an Oracle Home or custom JAR files on your SonarQube server.
- The XML Plugin has support (by SonarSource) so high probability it will still work in future versions of SonarQube.
- Writing rules is simple; XPath expressions. it does not require you to write Java code to create checks.
What we can't do with this setup is check relations between files since the XPath expressions are executed on single documents (defined with an Ant-style file-mask). Usually though when compiling or deploying SOA Suite composites, it will fail if there are references to files which are not present.
