The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group

JavaNLP Coding Conventions

We're not sticklers about whether you put a space after a comma in a list, but in order to make sure that the code stays readable for everyone using the editor or IDE of their choice, we do need to require that you use the same whitespace standards as everyone else. These are:

Space characters are used for indentation, not tabs
Indentation tab width is 2 spaces
Newline character is used to separate lines, not carriage return form feed, or anything weird like that (i.e., the Unix line separator convention).

We also recommend that you try to follow the Sun Java code conventions.

Configuring your editor

Many java editors can be configured to use these conventions.

Emacs

To make Emacs use only spaces, never tabs, for indentation, put this in your .emacs file:
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
To set the default indentation per level to 2 spaces, put this in your .emacs file:
(add-hook 'java-mode-hook '(lambda () (setq c-basic-offset 2)))
More Emacs tips.

IntelliJ

You can specify these things yourself in Settings->Global Code Style under the "Indents and Braces" tab, or you can import the "official" javaNLP settings file which will also make a few other minor changes to the style settings and give you some new potentially useful "Live Templates". Just download this file (it's a .jar file because IntelliJ is written in java, but don't let that confuse you; just import it as directed here), and then select File->Import Settings and point the browser to the file.