Hello all
This may be small details, but can we agree on Java coding convention?
We really have this requirement from industrial users who perform
quality analysis on our code: they ask us to have uniform rules. They
are not telling us which rule to use, but they are telling us "please
agree on some rules and applied them uniformly".
My proposal is to enforce widely-accepted Java convention rules. I'm not
proposing here anything "personal" or unusual, only the recommendations
or usages that anyone can find in Oracle documentation, tools, various
books and tutorial:
* Indentation is 4 spaces (some Shapefile code has 3 spaces).
* Standard keyword orders: "public static", not "static public".
* There is a space after keywords ("if", "for", "while", "catch", etc.)
* Curly bracket { } in "if", "else", "for", etc. blocks are mandatory
except when the statement is on a single line (e.g. "else if").
* Long lines are splitted. We do not have strict line length limit (I
try to not exceed 120 characters, while sometime I do). But
Shapefile and some other classes currently have lines up to 338
characters long that could easily be splitted.
* No "m_" prefix in member fields.
If peoples agree, I would like to configure a Checkstyle plugin for the
Maven build. I would start with almost no rules enabled, and would
enable some rules progressively only after we agreed on them.
Martin
