System.out.println() Rule for Checkstyle

I got around to a long ignored todo today over lunch at my desk–adding checkstyle to our cruisecontrol builds. It took about 1.5 hours mostly because the default rules in sun_checks.xml are a bit too extreme and have to be commented back into some state of reason. My favorite custom rule was the following example in the checkstyle documentation:

<module name="GenericIllegalRegexp">
      <!-- . matches any character, so we need to
         escape it and use \. to match dots. -->
      <property name="format" value="System\.out\.println"/>
</module>

No more System.out.println() for us. Currently we probably won’t fail any project for having violations, but it will help reinforce our newly adopted code reviews.