JMRI: Recommended Practices

Libraries to use

We use Java Swing for our GUI development. It's a lot more powerful than the original AWT, and the price is right. In particular, we try to use the "Bean format" of setting and getting members, call-backs to notify of changes, etc, to make it easier to build applications from JMRI components.
The Java communications toolbox (javax.comm) has worked fine on Macintosh, OS/2 and Linux for serial I/O. We hope it works fine on other platforms. For Windows, we had to move to the Serialio package from Serialio.com to be able to use the MS100 baud rate. To do this, the jmri.jmrix.loconet.ms100.MS100Adapter class was converted to use Java reflection to decide which whether the Serialio package is available; on other systems, it uses javax.comm. Note that our license for Serialio limits it to this use only; we are not permitted to distribute the libraries for other purposes.
The Java collections (List, etc) are available in JMRI, because we need them for various other packages. Use them if you'd like; there are often better approaches than to make everything a Vector. Originally we used the Java 1.1 version of this, but that restriction no longer applies; use the complete API if you'd like.
If you need to use comma-separated variable (CSV) files, please use the javacsv API if possible. We are already using that in a number of places, and will probably use it in more. If that doesn't provide enough functionality, we might eventually move to the opencsv API, but since we only want to use one, the conversion will be a lot of work.

Code Format

The Java recommendations for names, formatting, etc are really useful. If you find that you can't read a piece of code, these will help make it better.