Helpers

Miscellaneous helper scripts and resources used to build the other projects. The main components of the project are settings for the Eclipse IDE, resources for creating Javadoc, and some JUnit test helpers.

All Java source code in these projects has been autoformatted using an Eclipse plugin. The settings in eclipse-java-formatting.xml can be imported and, for example, used on save to maintain code consistency.

Including Java code fragments in Javadoc comments is a useful way to explain and exemplify the classes and methods being documented. The javadoc-stylesheet.css resource is a default JDK 1.7 stylesheet with some additions to assist in formatting such code samples in a manner similar to many popular IDEs.

A pre tag is used to contain code. This allows for appropriate indentation to be used. Additional span tags are used to specify keywords (k), identifiers (i), comments (c) and literals (l). For example:

/**
 * Lorum ipsem, etc, foo:
 * 
 * <pre class="code java">
 *   <span class="k">public class</span> <span class="i">Foo</span> {
 *     
 *     <span class="k">private int</span> <span class="i">_bar</span> = <span class="i">1234</span>;
 *     
 *     <span class="c">// ... etc</span>
 *     
 *   }
 * </pre>
 */
public something () {
// ...
}

Would render with appropriate syntax highlighting defined by the stylesheet. The styles are divided to give a generic code class which defines some common formatting and then a more specific java class. This pattern then allows code examples to be given in alternative languages such as C++.

The unit testing framework of choice for these projects is JUnit. Some additional rules and static helper methods are defined here for convenience. More details can be found in the Javadocs.