Guide to helping with SmartWeb

As with any open source project, there are several ways you can help:

  • Join the mailing lists and forums (please note some forums ARE the mailing lists!) answer other user's questions
  • Report bugs, feature requests and other issues in the issue tracking application
  • Build the framework for yourself, in order to fix bugs
  • Submit patches to reported issues (both those you find, or that others have filed)
  • Help with the documentation by pointing out areas that are lacking or unclear, and if you are so inclined, submitting patches to correct it. You can quickly contribute rough thoughts to the wiki, or you can volunteer to help collate and organise information that is already there.

    Your participation in the community is much appreciated!

Why Would I Want to Help?

There are several reasons these are good things.

  • By answering other people's questions, you can learn more for yourself
  • By submitting your own fixes, they get incorporated faster
  • By reporting issues, you ensure that bugs don't get missed, or forgotten
  • You are giving back to a community that has given you software for free

How do I Join the Project?

The project operate under a meritocracy, meaning those that the developers notice participating to a high extent will be invited to join the project as a committer.

This is as much based on personality and ability to work with other developers and the community as it is with proven technical ability. Being unhelpful to other users, or obviously looking to become a committer for bragging rights and nothing else is frowned upon, as is asking to be made a committer without having contributed sufficiently to be invited.

Developers Conventions

There are a number of conventions used in the project, which contributors and developers alike should follow for consistency's sake.

Code Style

The code styling is a derived from the coding guidelines established by Sun Microsystems and well documented in the official Java Code Conventions Guide. The code style adopted by the SmartWeb framework is a little more relaxed.

Commit Rules

We have few rules on files committed to the repository, but we encourage anyone to respect them, which means respect other committers:

  • Always comment your commits with a meaningfull description
  • Always leave the main branch into a consistent, compilable state
  • Don't commit your modifications all togheter but split them into consistent, atomic chunks so they can be atomically rolled back or compared if needed

    Any developer who repeatedly misleads this rules will see his committing privileges revoked in respect of other committers.