A bit about Java code conventions

Most commonly used set of Java coding conventions comes from Sun Microsystems and it is still available on Oracle website. The document describes many important aspects of formatting, naming conventions etc for Java.

However, for most of the teams it is not enough for two major reasons. First of all, the document has become quite outdated in some cases as it is has been created back in 1999. Things like maximum of 80 characters per line, when most of us use full HD monitors, does not seem right. The other reason is that Sun’s code conventions still leaves a lot of freedom and it is easier to maintain and read the code written in the similar fashion. This is why many teams decide to create additional code conventions on top of the Sun’s document adding more specific things.

In this post I am discussing two of the Java code conventions which are not part of the mentioned official Java code convention, but which are often added on top of it. These two are: keep all variables in the code as „final” and using „this” for every field and method access in class.

These rules may seem not important, but it is worth to have in mind that we spend much more time reading the code than actually writing it. This makes any, even small readability improvement valuable.

Comments

comments powered by Disqus