Question

I work on a medium sized development team that maintains a 8+ years old web application written in Java 1.4.

For new development I always try to convince people to adhere to newer standards and best practices, That goes from simple things like using new naming standards like HtmlImplementation over HTMLImplementation, to things like why it’s better to code against an interface versus coding against concrete classes, favor immutability or object composition a over class inheritance.

I have found this rather generic link in Stackoverflow, which is not Java-oriented nor complete.

I always try to explain the rationale behind my arguments, and always suggest people buy the latest edition of Effective Java, but it’s not every developer that takes my word without questioning (which is a good thing).

When that happens, they often ask me for pointers where they could read further about that specific good practice and sometimes I fail to quickly find pointers about that.

Do you have any links to online material I could gather in a ‘collection’ of Best Practices reference, in a way I can always look that up and suggest the ‘further reading’ to my teammates?

Answer 1

Check out these links :

• Best Practice Software Engineering (more in depth)
• Software Engineeting Best Practices (lists briefly out some practices and tools by name)

One book (that concentrates mostly on tools worth considering):

• Java Power Tools (O’Reilly)