If you get some third party source that you wish to maintain as a part of a larger project, odds are its coding conventions do not match the rest of the project's. I generally adhere to the policy that one codes in the format of the surrounding code - in the third party's code I would follow their coding conventions even if they are not my own. If this is not done then one gets really hard to read third party code. I believe many large
development organizations have a similar policy. What this means is that being able to easily set style policy on a project by project bases is very useful. Forcing one to copy and paste all of the style properties each time a new project is create can not be a good thing ... what if your group decides to change one little style property; you have to edit all property files. This runs against a tenant of software engineering - one should code it only once and then import by reference not copy and paste over and over again. I have always felt that the Sun style should be the default style for all Java code (even though when I started coding Java it was not my C++ style ... I just changed to the style of the language developer) - but I understand that others have their reasons for having their own way of doing things. I once worked with a real smart Java programmer (now studying to be a Buddist monk in Thailand) who coded Java in the gnu-C style (as a result of that I wrote a Java formatter that can convert between styles - if you have used Jindent then as a comparison Jindent is a childs toy (IMFO)). ..... Anyway, as I suggested in my Tuesday email "maven's default checkstyle settings" maven should allow one to refer to a separate property file for any given project's style. That way one gets a centralized set of style property files for an organization. Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
