Java Glossary : ordering

Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy Green ©1996-2004 Canadian Mind Products

Java definitions: 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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ordering

I have been experimenting with various ways of ordering the variables and methods in classes. You want a consistent scheme to help you:

• Understand how the class works
• Have onscreen all at once everything that is relevant to the current task.
• Find the little piece are looking for.

The third consideration is less important these days with quasi-SCID tools that let you find the definition for something at a mouse click.

You can order for the convience of either someone using your class as a black box, or for someone who is trying to understand how it works inside, or for the convience of the maintenance programmer thoroughly familiar with it.

There are tools such as VAG and Eclipse that will reorder methods and declarations for you. It does not matter to the computer, unless initialisation code contains forward reference.

Here are some possible schemes.

• Top down. But the highest level methods at the top and the fine detail at the bottom. This way someone can understand your class from the top down or the bottom up.
• Public first, the protected, then private. This puts the stuff of most interest to your clients at the top. They can ignore the rest.
• Put varibles just above or just below the methods that use them most. Then they will likely be conviently onscreen for reference automatically when you are viewing the code that uses them.
• Put all the variables at the beginning or the end of the class. So it is easy to see just what data a class holds, and thus what general potential it has for methods without even looking at the methods. Within that you can possibly group the constants public static final, the class variables and the instance variables.
• Sort alphabetically within category. If you name your methods and variables appropriately this will group related variables together. For a start all the getXXX and setXXX will group together.

For keywords order preferably like this: public, protected, private, abstract, static, final, transient, volatile, synchronized, native, strictfp

I'd interested in discovering links to tools that will automatically reorder.

coding conventions ¤ sort

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