[hibernate-dev] Beyond checkstyle

Hi all, in Quarkus we're using a plugin which automatically reformats the code and sorts imports. In our older projects we've been using checkstyle; the goal has always been to try to avoid conflicts and improve readability, but to try to impose such consistency typically leads to a significant annoyance and waste of time during development - so imposing checkstyle hans't been very popular, and certainly comes at a cost. So the idea in Quarkus has this nice effect: rather than getting "in the way" it uses a plugin which automatically fixes the code, one needs to just add the further changes to version control (CI can be setup to fail rather than fix). The plugin used by Quarkus have some drawbacks though: the code style can't be configured, and it happens to look very different than the Hibernate conventions so I don't think it would be useful for us. With Hibernate Reactive I started now to explore a new tool which looks better: - https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-reactive/pull/191/commits/c7c47c4c... This one is rather flexible and configurable, great support for Gradle, and can also be set to automatically fix the code rather than complain. We're going to use it on Hibernate Reactive to enforce only some essentials: license headers, remove unused imports, remove end-of-line whitespace. I suppose we could start using it for some more advanced rules later, but I'd be cautious about it. One high on my list of wishlist is to have imports sorted in a standard way, as that's another source of totally pointless, annoying conflicts. Other projects might want to explore using it as well? It supposedly supports Maven as well; haven't tests it though. See: - https://github.com/diffplug/spotless Thanks