A bunch of people have said they've preferred to use the import fully.qualified.ClassName approach. I don't see that there is a problem with having fully qualified references in the code for a single use of a class (like an implementation of a class name); however, your class will then 'depend' on that implementation.
Agreed. I think the general rule is just to avoid glob imports, then leave the usage of FQCNs up to the discretion of the developer. Oh, but I would suggest that FQCNs if used be minimized. I have seen some people (and IDEs) which like to code everything with FQCNs and that is just an ugly, ugly mess to deal with.
I do not agree that we should have any concrete rules on how to sort imports though. I would like to see imports grouped, but I do not really care that they are alphabetical or whatever. Furthermore I do not want to spend time alphabetizing my imports or performing other such superfluous code alterations.
--jason
