What is boilerplate code

Question

A coworker had never heard of this  and I couldn t provide a real definition  For me  it s always been an instance of  I-know-it-when-I-see-it    Bonus question  who originated the term

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From whatis techtarget com       In information technology  a boilerplate is a unit of writing that can   be reused over and over without change  By extension  the idea is   sometimes applied to reusable programming as in  boilerplate code     The term derives from steel manufacturing  where boilerplate is steel   rolled into large plates for use in steam boilers  The implication is   either that boilerplate writing has been time-tested and strong as    steel   or possibly that it has been rolled out into something strong   enough for repeated reuse    Beyond programming       A boilerplate can be compared to a certain kind of template  which can   be thought of as a fill-in-the-blanks boilerplate  Some typical   boilerplates include  mission statements  safety warnings  commonly   used installation procedures  copyright statements  and responsibility   disclaimers    In my experience as a programmer  the proper kind of boilerplate code is typically a bunch of code that you start off with that s not large and or complicated enough to be called a framework   A typical example would be the HTML5 Boilerplate

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In a nutshell  boilerplate codes are repetitive codes required to be included in the application with little to no change by the program framework  and contribute nothing to the logic of the application  When you write pseudo codes you can remove boilerplate codes  The recommendation is to use a proper Editor that generates boilerplate codes  in HTML  the boilerplate codes in the interface   lt  DOCTYPE html gt      lt html gt         lt head gt            lt title gt  lt  title gt         lt  head gt         lt body gt   lt  body gt      lt  html gt   in C   The boilerplate codes of properties  class Price        private string  price       public string Price             get  return  price           set   price  value

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It s code that can be used by many applications contexts with little or no change   Boilerplate is derived from the steel industry in the early 1900s

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boilerplate code  is any seemingly repetitive code that shows up again and again in order to get some result that seems like it ought to be much simpler   It s a subjective definition   The term comes from  boilerplate  in the newspaper industry  wiki

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On the etymology the term boilerplate  from http   www takeourword com Issue009 html        Interestingly  the term arose from the newspaper business    Columns   and other pieces that were syndicated were sent out to subscribing   newspapers in the form of a mat  i e  a matrix    Once received    boiling lead was poured into this mat to create the plate used to   print the piece  hence the name boilerplate   As the article printed   on a boilerplate could not be altered  the term came to be used by   attorneys to refer to the portions of a contract which did not change   through repeated uses in different applications  and finally to   language in general which did not change in any document that was used   repeatedly for different occasions    What constitutes boilerplate in programming  As may others have pointed out  it is just a chunk of code that is copied over and over again with little or no changes made to it in the process

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Boilerplate in software development can mean different things to different people but generally means the block of code that is used over and over again   In MEAN stack development  this term refers to code generation through use of template  It s easier than hand coding the entire application from scratch and it gives the code block consistency and fewer bugs as it is clean  tested and proven code and it s open source so it is constantly getting updated or fixed therefore it saves a lot of time as using framework or code generator  For more information about MEAN stack  click here

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In practical terms  boilerplate code is the stuff you cut-n-paste all over the place   Often it ll be things like a module header  plus some standard required declarations  every module must declare a logger  every module must declare variables for its name and revision  etc    On my current project  we re writing message handlers and they all have the same structure  read a message  validate it  process it  and to eliminate dependencies among the handlers we didn t want to have them all inherit from a base class  so we came up with a boilerplate skeleton   It declared all the routine variables  the standard methods  exception handling framework  mdash  all a developer had to do was add the code specific to the message being handled   It would have been quick  amp  easy to use  but then we found out we were getting our message definitions in a spreadsheet  which used a boilerplate format   so we wound up just writing a code generator to emit 90  of the code  including the unit tests

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You can refer to it as  snippets  or more accurately  collection of snippets    The term I think was coined from the press and printing industry  where they used actual  plates  and then re-used them as chunks again   In modern-day internet it is a part of an ongoing  annoying IMHO  trend of using fancy terms for simple things in order to look more trendy and sophisticated   see RESPONSIVE   adaptable   fluid

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Boilerplate is what good programmers avoid  repetition

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Joshua Bloch has a talk about API design that covers how bad ones make boilerplate code necessary    Minute 46 for reference to boilerplate  listening to this today

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A boilerplate is a unit of writing that can be reused over and over without change  By extension  the idea is sometimes applied to reusable programming  as in    boilerplate code

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From Wikipedia      In computer programming  boilerplate is the term used to describe sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration  It is more often used when referring to languages that are considered verbose  i e  the programmer must write a lot of code to do minimal jobs    So basically you can consider boilerplate code as a text that is needed by a programming language very often all around the programs you write in that language   Modern languages are trying to reduce it  but also the older language which has specific type-checkers  for example OCaml has a type-inferrer that allows you to avoid so many declarations that would be boilerplate code in a more verbose language like Java

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Boilerplate code means a piece of code which can be used over and over again  On the other hand  anyone can say that it s a piece of reusable code   The term actually came from the steel industries   For a little bit of history  according to Wikipedia      In the 1890s  boilerplate was actually cast or stamped in metal ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States  Until the 1950s  thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation s largest supplier  the Western Newspaper Union  Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written    Now according to Wikipedia      In object-oriented programs  classes are often provided with methods for getting and setting instance variables  The definitions of these methods can frequently be regarded as boilerplate  Although the code will vary from one class to another  it is sufficiently stereotypical in structure that it would be better generated automatically than written by hand  For example  in the following Java class representing a pet  almost all the code is boilerplate except for the declarations of Pet  name and owner   public class Pet       private PetName name      private Person owner       public Pet PetName name  Person owner            this name   name          this owner   owner             public PetName getName             return name             public void setName PetName name            this name   name             public Person getOwner             return owner             public void setOwner Person owner            this owner   owner

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Boilerplate definition is becoming more global in many other programming languages nowadays  It comes from OOP and hybrid languages that have become OOP and were before procedual have now the same goal to keep repeating the code you build with a model template class object hence why they adapt this term  You make a template and the only things you do for each instance of a template are the parameters to individualize an object this part is what we call boilerplate  You simply re-use the code you made a template of  just with different parameters    Synonyms a blueprint is a boilerplate a stencil is a boilerplate a footer is a boilerplate a design pattern for multiple use is a boilerplate  a signature of a mail is a boilerplate

[terminology] What is boilerplate code?

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