[Springframework-developer] Code formatting tools

[Tony F. <ton...@ya...>]

Rod,

I am a few days away from checking in the ErrorCoded stuff.  I've made a few changes, and incorporated your feedback into what I have.  My changes will include now allowing Exceptions to be generated either from a "string" (already "resolved"), or from an errorCode +errorArgs+locale.  I will email you all code to review before making any changes in the repos.

Just wanted to bounce this off of you and the group.  What do you think of the developers using a code beautification tool before checking anything into the repos? 

 One of the things I'm struggling with is I am very carefree when I code with my indentation.  Why?  I use a code beautifier before I save my code.  When making modifications to the framework however, it is not a good idea to run classes I'm changing through a code beautifier because it will shuffle things around from what they were so much that it will be difficult to see the small diffs that might have been made to a file.

Here's my suggestion.  Integrate Jalopy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jalopy) into the ANT build scripts either when a build is done, or when the tests are run.  Jalopy is opensource, is very configurable, and has pluggins for all the major IDEs and ANT.  A very nice feature is that you can save the formatting configuration you like for it in an XML file that you would then distribute with the build file.  Assuming all developers run ANT before checking things into CVS, their files will all conform to the format you like.  (It also allows for putting separator lines for things like constructors, static vars, instance vars, etc - as you seem to advocate in your book).

This will make it a lot easier to see minor changes that are made from each iteration of code checked in.