• Coding Style and API Design

    by  • August 28, 2011 • Developers, KDE • 3 Comments

    Once in a while, there are really interesting blogs, presentations and reports about how to do things right as software developer. This is a quick list of links about API design and coding style:

    1. Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs (Qt4), by Matthias Ettrich, 2005
    2. API Design Principles, extended version of (1), Qt Developer Network (Nokia)
    3. The Little Manual of API Design, an in-depth summary of (1) and (2), Jasmin Blanchette, 2008 (Nokia)
    4. Developing Quality Libraries, presentation of (1)-(3) on the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria, Oliver Goffart, 2009
    5. How to Design a Good API and Why It Matters, Joshua Bloch, 2007 (Google)
    6. Qt Coding Style, good coding style not limited to Qt, Qt Developer Network (Nokia)
    7. Guidelines for KDE Development, similar to e.g. (6), KDE Techbase
    8. Hall of API Shame: Boolean Trap, Ariya Hidayat, 2011

    Thanks to all the authors for sharing & happy reading!

    About

    Dominik is a PhD student at the Control Theory and Robotics Lab, TU Darmstadt, as part of the Research Training Group GKMM (GRK1362). My research focuses on state estimation in distributed systems. As hobby, I contribute to the KDE project and work on the Kate application and editor component.

    http://www.kate-editor.org

    3 Responses to Coding Style and API Design

    1. Svyatoslav Kuzmich
      August 29, 2011 at 13:00

      Nice compilation!
      Just want to add my favourite Google style:
      http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml
      They they give a lot of arguments to prove each point.

      Reply
    2. Martin Reddy
      August 29, 2011 at 18:33

      And if you’ll forgive the self promotion, my new book is focused exactly on this topic: “API Design for C++”. See http://APIBook.com/.

      Reply