Like any other part of WAF, PL/SQL code must be maintainable and professional. This means that it must be consistent and therefore must abide by certain standards. The standards will ensure that our product will be useful long after the current people building and maintaining it are around. This chapter addresses some standards and guidelines that will help us achieve this goal.
This chapter is written from the experience and perspective of the Red Hat Applications development team. Because our product is open source, these standards are useful for all developers to understand and incorporate.
All PL/SQL code must be well documented. We must write code that is maintainable by others. This is especially true in our case because we are building an open source toolkit, so anyone can download and browse the source code. Our motto is, "Document like you are trying to impress your favorite programming professor."
It is important to be consistent throughout an application as much as is possible given the nature of team development. This means carrying style and other conventions such as naming within an application, not just within one file.