In order to better communicate project progress to a non-technical audience (e.g. customers) I found the dashboard-maven-plugin recommended in a few places so I decided to try it out. I was a little wary since it only had one release in 2008 but didn't find anything else recommended at the time. I must have been having a bad day. At first everything went (relatively) smoothly as I integrated Cobratura, PMD, Checkstyle, Findbugs (far better than PMD), JDepend and Taglist (although I couldn't get its regular expressions to work).
However I started getting dreaded JVM out of memory errors. At first I just increased the memory to 8 gigs and that worked for a little while. However as the project moved on and increased in size and complexity eventually I got problems even with 16 gigs used and I even had to increase my OS paging file to manage it. I verified that they were all used up by using the excellent Process Explorer to monitor the process memory usage. After turning Maven debugging on I found that the dashboard-maven-plugin was the last thing running before the crashes. After commenting it out I was able to complete my documentation build even going back down to 512m of permgen space and 8g of heapspace.
After getting more versed in reports and dashboards XRadar, Squale and SonarQube both look promising as alternative dashboards.
Lastly, to those that celebrate the western new year, Happy New Year!
