I'm glad you brought styling up for discussion, since there are various
inconsistencies in the current code base:
- Line lengths are indeed one issue I've noticed - I'd go for 120 chars
per line as well, though it's not as important as being consistent.
There are currently lines that are broken also at less than 100 chars,
at awkward places, for no apparent reason.
- Whitespace: there are currently places where tabs are used for
indentation instead of spaces, as well as many trailing spaces (which
were introducing many artificial diffs in patches I submitted).
- There are occasional blank lines added at unhelpful locations, e.g.
before the closing brace of a method, or between two closing braces of
two nested blocks.
- Some method definitions have parameter lists stacked with one
parameter per line with a common left-aligned margin, whereas others use
regular line-continuation rules and indentation (I personally much
prefer the latter).
- Inconsistent naming of variables, even of the same type and meaning in
very adjacent code.
- while javadocs are mostly missing, also the existing ones often don't
conform to the standard javadoc conventions.
- Various other inconsistencies I can't remember at the moment, but
which made review and work on the code harder for a newcomer (and would
make maintenance harder and more error-prone for existing devs as well).
It would be great to do a one-time sweep and fix all the existing
inconsistencies and respective rules, once the standard is decided upon,
and to better enforce them in the future.
Disclaimer: I'm new here, and haven't reviewed the entire CXF code base,
but focused mainly on the DOSGi subproject, so I don't know how much of
this applies elsewhere.
Christian - could you please also add a link to the checkstyle/pmd rules
in the guidelines page?
Amichai
On 05/21/2013 11:03 AM, Christian Schneider wrote:
Hi all,
at the moment our rules for code styles are a bit hidden. When Amichai
asked me about the rules at the CXF code base it took me some time to
find the
formatter for eclipse. I added a link to the Coding Guidelines in the
wiki. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CXF/Coding+Guidelines
When I checked it I found that the code formatter sets the line length
to 110 characters while the checkstyle rule checks for 120 characters.
I think we should set the same count for both rules.
Which do you prefer?
I favour 120 characters.
Christian
Btw. the checkstyle rules are here:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cxf/build-utils/trunk/buildtools/src/main/resources/cxf-checkstyle.xml
