nominal

nominal is a Java library designed to test compliance of identifier names with naming conventions.

nominal provides a configuration language to represent identifier naming conventions that can be used to specify conventions to test against. A description of the language can be found in the docs directory.

Copyright and License

nominal is Copyright (C) 2013-2015 The Open University and Copyright (C) 2017-2019 Simon Butler. nominal is open source software licensed under version 2.0 of the Apache License. A copy of the licence can be found in the directory LICENCES and the text is available at https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Getting Started

A guide to working with nominal can be found at https://github.com/sjbutler/nominal/wiki/Nominal:-Getting-Started

Requirements

nominal requires Java v8 to run.

Build

nominal is built using maven, and could be built using Gradle or Ivy.

Dependencies

nominal has the following dependencies:

1. SLF4J - nominal uses SLF4J for logging. Incorporating SLF4J in (existing) code is straightforward. A copy of slf4j-api.x.x.x.jar must be on the classpath when compiling and running nominal. Another slf4j jar will also be required to support logging -- see http://slf4j.org/ for more information nominal was coded against slf4j v1.7.25, so v1.7.25 or greater should work
2. mdsc - nominal uses mdsc which is available at https://github.com/sjbutler/mdsc/
3. idtk - nominal uses classes from idtk which is available at https://github.com/sjbutler/idtk-j/
4. ANTLR - ANTLR 4 is required to run nominal and to compile any changes to the grammar. antlr-x.x-complete.jar must be on the classpath. nominal was coded against ANTLR v4.4 See http://www.antlr.org/ (ANTLRWorks 2 is a useful tool for working with ANTLR grammars)
5. Apache Commons Lang3 - is available from https://commons.apache.org/

All dependencies are available from maven central and specified in the POM.

Citation

Nominal was developed during the PhD research of Simon Butler. If using nominal or extending nominal, or referring to it you should cite the following paper:

@InProceedings{Butler:2015:b,
 author={Butler, Simon and Wermelinger, Michel and Yu, Yijun},
  booktitle={2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)}, 
  title={Investigating Naming Convention Adherence in {J}ava References}, 
  year={2015},
  pages={41-50},
  doi={10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332450}
}

The full text of the paper is available from IEEEXplore (access may be restricted), or http://oro.open.ac.uk/43372

Caveat

nominal is research software. As such it is subject to change and no guarantees can be made about the stability of any API. There is also no guarantee that nominal will be maintained.