Can you help me gather a Java Best Practices online material collection?

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

I really don't think there's anything in the same league as Effective Java. The cost of buying a book is much smaller than the developer time spent reading it (or other material anyway) - so I would strongly recommend going for EJ rather than trying to find anything similar.

There may be an online version of Effective Java - I'm not sure.

I know this probably isn't the advice you wanted to get, but I'm that passionate about the quality of Effective Java :)

Answer 2

I use Sun's Java BluePrints as a source of best practices. The code samples serve as a "do it like this" standards document. The naming conventions and project conventions are must-reads.

There's some design-pattern stuff there, also, but more importantly, it's a complete "do it like this" set of examples.

Answer 3

Java Practices is a great site that I refer to often. It's been favorably compared to Joshua Bloch's Effective Java in the past, and I tend to agree.

Answer 4

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)