Introduction

These are informal notes gathered as I've started working on Latka. Hopefully they will make sense to those coming after me, and possibly clarify the current state for the existing

Coding Style

Latka has some unusual coding conventions, which we've hopefully captured using a tool, CheckStyle .

Onto the conventions... The Sun coding conventions are followed in most places, except for the items that follow

• private and protected member variables begin with an underscore,

  _requestSucceeded

• private methods also begin with an underscore on rare occasions (mainly when there is some public method and protected/private method with an otherwise identical signature)

• Javadoc on classes and methods is not yet complete. Feel free to help out here :-)

General Practices

Here are some of the development practices of the Latka team

• Before committing any changes, run a cvs diff to ensure unexpected changes are not being introduced

• Before committing java source code changes, do a clean build of the project to ensure all code still compiles. Run all testcases to ensure the code isn't broken. Run the checkstyle task to ensure code meets the project's current standards

• Before committing changes to the web pages:

  1. Ensure the original docbook is valid by validating the XML against the docbook DTD

  2. do a clean build of the webpages target in the main build file and view the resulting output