Coding Standards for the Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF)

These are the standards – or at least guidelines – that we aim to use for RIF code.

Java

We follow the Google Java Style Guide with a couple of minor differences:

• indentation is with tabs, not spaces;
• there is lots of old code that does not obey this guide.

On that second point, tidying up as well as improving old code as you touch it is encouraged.

Boilerplate

Many files still contain huge chunks of unnecessary boilerplate comments, firstly reiterating the licence, and then having a lot of nonsense about code organisation. Feel free to remove these as you find them. Just keep anything that actually provides information.

R

There don’t seem to be any particular standards for R coding. It’s a bit of a lawless landscape. At least try to keep the line length under 100, as per Java. Use meaningful names, and assign values with the <- operator, rather than =, as seems to be the standard recommendation. Why there are two ways to assign a value, I can’t even.

JavaScript

Google has one for JS as well, so maybe try to follow that. But with tabs.

HTML and CSS

Just don’t do anything too ugly.