Define coding style and conventions

[philliplbryant]

I'm trying to use the same code style and conventions as the current code base, but those conventions aren't always clear. If a well known convention is used, or is documented elsewhere, it would be helpful to provide a link to the documentation.

If the conventions are not documented, or cannot be easily defined, another option is to add a few project files from IntelliJ and/or Eclipse. While these files might not help those who do not use one of these IDEs, it would be beneficial to others.

A cursory search for suggested IntelliJ project files (also confirmed by my team's use of them), indicates adding the following files will help enforce styles and conventions without affecting other preferences:

.idea
 codeStyles
  codeStyleConfig.xml
  Project.xml
 insectionProfiles
  Project_Default.xml
 codeStyleSettings.xml
 encodings.xml

We would probably want to update .gitignore to include the following entries as well.

# Ignore all files in the .idea directory by default
/.idea/*

# Ignore contents of directories, then unignore specific files
/.idea/codeStyles/*
!/.idea/codeStyles/codeStyleConfig.xml
!/.idea/codeStyles/Project.xml

/.idea/inspectionProfiles/*
!/.idea/inspectionProfiles/Project_Default.xml

!/.idea/encodings.xml

I could certainly add these files, but then the project would use my conventions, which might not be the preferred convention.