existence of a "java standard"?

Question

I've been programming in Java for about 4 years now, but what I've learned was self-taught--I've never taken a formal class for the language. Recently at my job I heard two guys arguing over something called the "java standard" of programming that "99% of all professional java developers use." I've never heard of nor intentionally used this "standard" while writing code in java, so I guess I've gotten off easy with the bosses so far.

Is this so-called standard as popular as my coworker proposed in the java developing community?

Answer 1

Have a Formal look @ Coding Standard Doc By Sun [Oracle] :)

Answer 2

I would say so - to a greater or lesser extent.

I'd say almost everyone follows most of Sun/Oracle's Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language document - but many places tweak it. For example, I've very rarely seen much Java code which doesn't follow its naming conventions for methods, but often organisations will have their own whitespace conventions.

Answer 3

Not knowing what your co-workers were arguing about, I cant tell for sure what standard they were referring to.

Here is the code convention guidelines published by Sun (now part of Oracle). http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/codeconvtoc-136057.html

Answer 4

I have been writing Java for a long time, there used to be some books on the Java Language that Sun used to put out, they are no longer kept up to the latest version. The latest book is for 5.o and we are almost up to 7.0.

The standard is anything here:
http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/

The coding standard books that are mentioned are useful as far as style to program in, but they do not cover the newer versions of the language.

Maybe you could ask your coworkers for a copy of this information they are referring to and post it here to enlighten us ?