Code Style

This page documents code style guidelines. For general contributing guidelines, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code Guidelines

• Generally, follow Oracle's formatting standards (alt link).
• The indentation should solely consist of 4 spaces instead of tabs.
• No trailing whitespaces for code lines, comments or configuration files.
• No CRLF line endings, only LF is allowed.
• For Windows-based machines, you can configure Git to do this for your by running git config --global core.autocrlf true.
• If you're running a Linux or Mac OSX, you should run git config --global core.autocrlf input instead.
• For more information about line feeds. See this article.
• No 80 character line limit or 'weird' midstatement newlines.
• Avoid nested code structures.
• All files must end with a new line.
• Use import * if you import 4 or more classes from the same package.

Javadoc Guidelines

• @Override methods should not have docs. They inherit their parent's docs.
• Public and protected methods on public classes should have docs.
• Private methods should have docs when their function is non-obvious.
• Public classes except protocol internals should have docs.
• Fields on classes that are not simple data structures should have docs.

Basically, when in doubt, docs.

Weird Specifics

• In the message codecs, each read from the buffer should be assigned to a variable before the message is constructed. Avoid constructs like return new XMessage(buffer.readInt());