Stylechecker Plug-in for Cevelop

In design work, a styleguide defines rules and guidelines to be adhered to for achieving a uniform visual look. Styleguides as such also exist for source code. Additionally, to contributing to a visually pleasing codebase, a styleguide increases understandability and readability of source code. In many projects, coding guidelines exist and are part of the development cycle ranging from a small set of rules to a broader compilation of guidelines to be followed. Cevelop is an integrated development environment (IDE) for C++. It is developed and maintained by the Institute for Software (IFS) at HSR. Cevelop itself is based on the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT) project. Currently, Cevelop is lacking the feature of styleguide checking.

The primary goal of the Stylechecker plug-in for Cevelop is providing the capabilities to perform styleguide checking and rule violation reporting. Furthermore, the plug-in is to offer automated resolutions wherever possible. In the scope of this
project, the focus lies on covering naming conventions for three predefined styleguides: Google styleguide, Canonical styleguide and Geosoft styleguide. Additionally, users need to be able to create custom styleguides, define rules for it, change existing ones and import/export styleguides for sharing with team members.

The implemented Stylechecker plug-in realizes styleguide checking as well as automated resolutions. To achieve this, the plug-in uses the abstract syntax tree provided by Eclipse CDT. Furthermore, the Stylechecker plug-in uses CDT's code analysis (Codan) framework, an integrated Eclipse CDT plug-in, providing facilities to create markers and resolutions for C++ development. In combination, checking, reporting and initiating resolutions become available. The Stylechecker plug-in allows users to compose custom styleguide rules by joining one or more expressions, defining the language elements to check the rules for and providing custom messages on reporting.