Retrieve third-party checks from a url rather than filesystem

[devvmh]

My team at work uses a third party check that we developed internally. We haven't open sourced it yet but it's available on a company-internal server.

I'd like to add a jar to the "Third Party Checks" section by specifying a url, and having the plugin download it for me.

I might consider coding this but would need help/pointers on the best way to accomplish that - I've never really worked on Checkstyle or an IntelliJ plugin before.

[jshiell]

It sounds like a sensible thing, but it's certainly not trivial - particular around the error cases. E.g. we'd need to cache it locally for speed - how long do we cache for it? When do we refresh it? What if the refreshed JAR is no longer valid or doesn't exist? etc. It's not rocket science, but it does need some thought.

Thinking out loud - the HTTP infra for loading rules files could probably be extracted and reused; for simplicity, we'd probably just need to surface network errors to the user and let them decide the consequences, to start with at least.

No promises, but I'm thinking about it a bit at the very least 😄