Whenever more than one developer comes together to work on a shared project, questions of style consistency arise. As every developer has his own habit of formating code, naming methods and variables, the resulting mix becomes confusing and hard to read, as soon as two incompatible styles get mixed up. The only way to avoid such a chaos, is to define mandatory rules, which every developer has to follow.
This style guide defines such a set of common style rules for JFreeReport and all adjacent projects.
Some of the given rules are mandatory and must not be ignored or violated. Other rules given in this document can be considered recommendations, they should be followed as closely as possible, but can be violated if there is a known (and documented) reason for it.
As Java is a complex language, which gives you a great freedom in writing your code, there will be many fields, which remain uncovered by the rules given in this document. Where ever possible, we will try to give examples for such known cases to reduce the number of different variations of these cases.