Contributing

There are various ways to contribute:

Join the mailing lists and answer questions raised by users.
Participate in discussions around new features, bugs and documentation.
Report bugs and features on JIRA.
Contribute new controls, features and patches to JIRA.

Click Extras

Click Extras provides a place for people to contribute their own code to the Click project and have it package with the standard distribution. Contributed code will be subject to review and may require modifications before it is included in the Click distribution.

Design

One of the overriding design principles with Click is to keep it simple, this makes the code easier to understand and more reliable.

Another guiding principle is YAGNI (You Ain't Going to Need It), or don't build it until you really really need it. Click is trying to provide an 80/20 rule framework where 80% of peoples needs are meet by a framework which is only 20% in size.

When developing Click Extras contributions please follow these principles.

Auto File Deployment

To make preconfigured resources (templates, stylesheets, etc.) available to web applications Click automatically deploys configured classpath resources to the /click directory at startup (existing files will not be overwritten).

To enable your controls to deploy resources on startup place the resources in the Click Extras JAR directory 'META-INF/resources/'. See the section Deploying Custom Resources for more information on resource deployment.

Coding Style and Practices

Click follows the Sun conversions for Java code style. Other style conventions and practices include:

indents are 4 spaces wide and no tabs are used
public and protected visibility members require Javadoc
private and package visibility members do not require Javadoc
favour the use of unchecked RuntimeException and avoid creating new Exception classes
check method parameters and throw IllegalArgumentException if parameters are null or invalid
avoid creating any more classes than you need to get the job done
localize control messages in the classes properties files
use the Context.getLocale() method to obtain a users locale
before checking in code run the Ant task: ant format-java