Automatically check Java files for coding standard compliance
I would not recommend doing such changes automatically. Even though most of the checkstyle/pmd complies are valid, it happens to me that I need to ignore some of the warnings/errors. Moreover - there is only very small pool of such easy issues. Most of the notifications require more complex operations and probably couldn't be done without human interaction.
I'm using Sonar integration. It contains many external checkers like PMD, CPD, Checkstyle, Findbugs and can integrate with some other useful tools like Cobertura (test coverage statistics). Its almost trivial to bind Sonar build to Jenkins build and trying to avoid major/critical issues might be considered as a good approach.
In developer environment I use Eclipse integration with findbugs. There is also some point of integration with sonar but it requires either submitting the code to server or running server locally, which I personally don't like. However after few cycles of polishing the code after code review in Sonar you will notice that you (and other team members) stick to most of the rules and checking reports on daily basis is enough.
One solution is to use JCSC / checkstyle or other tools that are command line friendly. Integrate this with your build process. Individual developer runs this on his branch.
Most tools integrate well with Jenkins (via plugins), which can be used as dash board
Further to @Jayan's answer, Jenkins has a CheckStyle plugin that will display the results of each CheckStyle run and let you set the build status depending on how many violations are found. So your setup steps would be:
- Set up your CheckStyle rules to fit your coding standards
- Add a step to your Jenkins build that runs CheckStyle
- Add a post build step to publish the CheckStyle results.