We are pleased to announce the Maven PMD Plugin 1.8 release! 

http://maven.apache.org/maven-1.x/plugins/pmd/

The Maven PMD plugin is a plugin that wraps the PMD framework 
(http://pmd.sourceforge.net). PMD is a source checking framework that works by 
scanning Java source code and looks for potential problems like: unused local 
variables, empty catch blocks, unused parameters, empty 'if' statements, etc. 

===============================================================================

Changes in this version include:

  New Features:

o New property "maven.pmd.targetjdk" to define the target JDK. Fixes 
  MPPMD-19. Thanks to Wim Deblauwe. 
o Add a link on each error to explain it. 
o New properties "maven.pmd.failonerror" and "maven.pmd.failonruleviolation" 
  to fail the build if any errors or problems are found. Fixes MPPMD-21. 
o New property "maven.pmd.console" to display pmd errors to the console. 
  Fixes MPPMD-13. 

  Fixed bugs:

o Do not generate links to JXR files if they are not created. 
o Fix NullPointerException if pom.build.sourceDirectory or 
  pom.build.unitTestSourceDirectory are not defined. 

  Changes:

o Use properties maven.jxr.destdir and maven.jxr.destdir.test to generate 
  links from the PMD report to jxr files. 
o Upgrade to pmd-3.5.  

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To automatically install the plugin, type the following on a single line:

maven plugin:download
  -Dmaven.repo.remote=http://people.apache.org/repo/m1-snapshot-repository/,http://repo1.maven.org/maven
  -DgroupId=maven
  -DartifactId=maven-pmd-plugin
  -Dversion=1.8

For a manual installation, you can download the plugin here:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/java-repository/maven/plugins/maven-pmd-plugin-1.8.jar
 

Have fun!
-The Maven PMD Plugin development team