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  • European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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  • Python Coding standards vs. productivity

    - by Shroatmeister
    I work for a large humanitarian organisation, on a project building software that could help save lives in emergencies by speeding up the distribution of food. Many NGOs desperately need our software and we are weeks behind schedule. One thing that worries me in this project is what I think is an excessive focus on coding standards. We write in python/django and use a version of PEP0008, with various modifications e.g. line lengths can go up to 160 chars and all lines should go that long if possible, no blank lines between imports, line wrapping rules that apply only to certain kinds of classes, lots of templates that we must use, even if they aren't the best way to solve a problem etc. etc. One core dev spent a week rewriting a major part of the system to meet the then new coding standards, throwing away several suites of tests in the process, as the rewrite meant they were 'invalid'. We spent two weeks rewriting all the functionality that was lost, and fixing bugs. He is the lead dev and his word carries weight, so he has convinced the project manager that these standards are necessary. The junior devs do as they are told. I sense that the project manager has a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance about all this but nevertheless agrees with it vehemently as he feels unsure what else to do. Today I got in serious trouble because I had forgotten to put some spaces after commas in a keyword argument. I was literally shouted at by two other devs and the project manager during a Skype call. Personally I think coding standards are important but also think that we are wasting a lot of time obsessing with them, and when I verbalized this it provoked rage. I'm seen as a troublemaker in the team, a team that is looking for scapegoats for its failings. Since the introduction of the coding standards, the team's productivity has measurably plummeted, however this only reinforces the obsession, i.e. the lead dev simply blames our non-adherence to standards for the lack of progress. He believes that we can't read each other's code if we don't adhere to the conventions. This is starting to turn sticky. Now I am trying to modify various scripts, autopep8, pep8ify and PythonTidy to try to match the conventions. We also run pep8 against source code but there are so many implicit amendments to our standard that it's hard to track them all. The lead dev simple picks faults that the pep8 script doesn't pick up and shouts at us in the next stand-up meeting. Every week there are new additions to the coding standards that force us to rewrite existing, working, tested code. Thank heavens we still have tests, (I reverted some commits and fixed a bunch of the ones he removed). All the while there is increasing pressure to meet the deadline. I believe a fundamental issue is that the lead dev and another core dev refuse to trust other developers to do their job. But how to deal with that? We can't do our job because we are too busy rewriting everything. I've never encountered this dynamic in a software engineering team. Am I wrong to question their adherence to coding standards? Has anyone else experienced a similar situation and how have they dealt with it successfully? (I'm not looking for a discussion just actual solutions people have found)

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  • Digital Agenda in the EU means open standards after all

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes speech on Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda at Open Forum Europe 2010 Summit in Brussels refocuses the EU Digital Agenda on open standards. I say the speech scores a 90/100, smooth, smart, a little vicious at the fringes, maybe? Anyway, it shows the strategy might age and implement well. This is Dutch pragmatism at its best. The EU Digital Agenda (I give it an 85/100 score), while laudable, stops short of using the term. The next step for the European Commission is defining the term open standards. If they do that, and do it right, Vice President Kroes will go into history as having made a significant contribution towards global progress in e-government by possibly eradicating lock-in forever. Moreover, she will put Europe's SMEs in a better position to succeed in a global IT market filled with barriers to entry from players not fully understanding, using, or unpacking standards. Kroes' interesting suggestion that she will now explore a "legal proposal" on interoperability that will have an impact on all IT companies operating in the European market is more up for debate. An interoperability directive? One run by DG COMP or one run by DG INFSO, telecom style? Would something like that work? Would the industry like it? Would it help European governments? Possibly, if done right. The good thing was, Kroes pointed out that she will look for input from the industry. Kroes' track record is one of not being scared of taking on the Titans. She also wants to enact real, positive, lasting change. "I will not go anywhere", she said. All of that is good. And she does understand the importance of open standards. Let's now start discussing the details. Implementing the Digital Agenda is not simple. It requires collaboration across the various Directorates in the European Commission. Mounting a new Interoperability directive is also never attempted before. Getting it right is important. Even possibly finding out it cannot be done right and choosing a more light weight approach that is equally effective would be bold. Go Kroes!

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  • CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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  • Codeigniter Open Source Applications for Coding References

    - by Hafizul Amri
    I choose codeigniter to be my first framework to work with. Now I'm looking for open source applications built based on this framework to be my references for good coding practices and standards. From my previous experiences in application development, it was hard for me to maintain, upgrade, or modify existing applications due to my bad coding practices. Do you have any suggestion of application based on codeigniter framework for me to be referred? So that it can help me to write better coding by referring to their good and maybe best coding pratices. Thank you!

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  • Is Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda?

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    At OpenForum Europe Summit 2010, to be held in Brussels, Autoworld, 11 Parc du Cinquantenaire on Thursday 10 June 2010, a number of global speakers will discuss whether it indeed provides an open digital market as a catalyst for economic growth and if it will deliver a truly open e-government and digital citizenship (see Summit 2010). In 2008, OpenForum Europe, a not-for-profit champion of openness through open standards, hosted one of the most cited speeches by Neelie Kroes, then Commissioner of Competition. Her forward-looking speech on openness and interoperability as a way to improve the competitiveness of ICT markets set the EU on a path to eradicate lock-in forever. On the two-year anniversary of that event, Vice President Kroes, now the first-ever Commissioner of the Digital Agenda, is set to outline her plans for delivering on that vision. Much excitement surrounds open standards, given that Kroes is a staunch believer. The EU's Digital Agenda promises IT standardization reform in Europe and vows to recognize global standards development organizations (fora/consortia) by 2010. However, she avoided the term "open standards" in her new strategy. Markets are, of course, asking why she is keeping her cards tight on this crucial issue. Following her speech, Professor Yochai Benkler, award-winning author of "The Wealth of Networks", and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, appointed by the UK Government to work alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help transform public access to UK Government information join dozens of speakers in the quest to analyse, entertain and challenge European IT policy, people, and documents. Speakers at OFE Summit 2010 include David Drummond, Senior VP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, Google; Michael Karasick, VP Technology and Strategy, IBM; Don Deutsch, Vice President, Standards Strategy and Architecture for Oracle Corp; Thomas Vinje, Partner Clifford Chance; Jerry Fishenden, Director, Centre for Policy Research, and Rishab Ghosh, head, collaborative creativity group, UNU-MERIT, Maastricht (see speakers). Will openness stay at the heart of EU Digital Agenda? Only time will show.

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  • Are there well-known PowerShell coding conventions?

    - by Tahir Hassan
    Are there any well-defined conventions when programming in PowerShell? For example, in scripts which are to be maintained long-term, do we need to: Use the real cmdlet name or alias? Specify the cmdlet parameter name in full or only partially (dir -Recurse versus dir -r) When specifying string arguments for cmdlets do you enclose them in quotes (New-Object 'System.Int32' versus New-Object System.Int32 When writing functions and filters do you specify the types of parameters? Do you write cmdlets in the (official) correct case? For keywords like BEGIN...PROCESS...END do you write them in uppercase only? It seems that MSDN lack coding conventions document for PowerShell, while such document exist for example for C#.

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  • I need help with some terminology

    - by Christine
    I'm not a programmer; I'm a freelance writer and researcher. I have a client who'd looking for stats on certain "threats" to the apps market. One of them is cowboy coding. (I know what that means; that's not my question.) Specifically, he wants to see numbers regarding how many apps have failed/crashed/removed because of errors made by, in essence, sloppy coding. (I'm not here to debate the merits of cowboy coding, and whether or not it is sloppy; work with me here.) I've used every possible search term/phrase I can think of, but I can't find any hard numbers, just anecdotal evidence. Have any of you seen any reports that have this kind of data?

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  • My Doors - Why Standards Matter to Business

    - by Brian Dayton
    "Standards save money." "Standards accelerate projects." "Standards make better solutions."   What do these statements mean to you? You buy technology solutions like Oracle Applications but you're a business person--trying to close the quarter, get performance reviews processed, negotiate a new sourcing contract, etc.   When "standards" come up in presentations and discussions do you: -          Nod your head politely -          Tune out and check your smart phone -          Turn to your IT counterpart and say "Bob's all over this standards thing, right Bob?"   Here's why standards matter. My wife wants new external doors downstairs, ones that would get more light into the rooms. Am I OK with that? "Uhh, sure...it's a little dark in the kitchen."   -          24 hours ago - wife calls to tell me that she's going to the hardware store and may look at doors -          20 hours ago - wife pulls into driveway, informs me that two doors are in the back of her station wagon, ready for me to carry -          19 hours ago - I re-discovered the fact that it's not fun to carry a solid wood door by myself -          5 hours ago - Local handyman, who was at our house anyway, tells me that the doors we bought will likely cost 2-3x the material cost in installation time and labor...the doors are standard but our doorways aren't   We could have done more research. I could be more handy. Sure. But the fact is, my 1951 house wasn't built with me in mind. They built what worked and called it a day.   The same holds true with a lot of business applications. They were designed and architected for one-time use with one use-case in mind. Today's business climate is different. If you're going to use your processes and technology to differentiate your business you should have at least a working knowledge of: -          How standards can benefit your business -          Your IT organization's philosophy around standards -          Your vendor's track-record around standards...and watch for those who pay lip-service to standards but don't follow through   The rallying cry in most IT organizations today is "learn more about the business, drop the acronyms." I'm not advocating that you go out and learn how to code in Java. But I do believe it will help your business and your decision-making process if you meet IT ½...even ¼ of the way there.   Epilogue: The door project has been put on hold and yours truly has to return the doors to the hardware store tomorrow.

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  • Documenting and enforcing programming standards and guidelines for shared library

    - by dreza
    Myself and another developer with the go ahead from our IT director have started a general purpose library in .NET with the intention that it will provide many common purpose classes that we use in our day to day development. During discussions and design of the library we have come up with a set of standards that we want the library to follow to ensure it is maintained and expanded on in a consistent manner. What is the best way to ensure these decisions we made for the library get feed to the other developers who might be using and adding to this library in the future. One of our decisions was to ensure we review all checked in code so we expect initially there to be some differences in coding styles of individuals not fitting in with the project standards. Some ideas I had were: Add a Read-me.txt to the project that outline the guidelines and standards Send an email out to everyone in the team to let them know about the project etc Call a team meeting to go through this new project and our expectations and standards we were aiming to follow Try and enforce the standards via Visual Studio (not sure if this would be possible or how just an idea) At the moment there is no general company programming standards so this would be a first really insofar as we are creating a standard that different project teams would need to adhere to.

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  • Working on someone else's code

    - by Xavi Valero
    I have hardly a year's experience in coding. After I started working, most of the time I would be working on someone else's code, either adding new features over the existing ones or modifying the existing features. The guy who has written the actual code doesn't work in my company any more. I am having a hard time understanding his code and doing my tasks. Whenever I tried modifying the code, I have in some way messed with the working features. What all should I keep in mind, while working over someone else's code?

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  • Standards for how developers work on their own workstations

    - by Jon Hopkins
    We've just come across one of those situations which occasionally comes up when a developer goes off sick for a few days mid-project. There were a few questions about whether he'd committed the latest version of his code or whether there was something more recent on his local machine we should be looking at, and we had a delivery to a customer pending so we couldn't wait for him to return. One of the other developers logged on as him to see and found a mess of workspaces, many seemingly of the same projects, with timestamps that made it unclear which one was "current" (he was prototyping some bits on versions of the project other than his "core" one). Obviously this is a pain in the neck, however the alternative (which would seem to be strict standards for how each developer works on their own machine to ensure that any other developer can pick things up with a minimum of effort) is likely to break many developers personal work flows and lead to inefficiency on an individual level. I'm not talking about standards for checked-in code, or even general development standards, I'm talking about how a developer works locally, a domain generally considered (in my experience) to be almost entirely under the developers own control. So how do you handle situations like this? Are the one of those things that just happens and you have to deal with, the price you pay for developers being allowed to work in the way that best suits them? Or do you ask developers to adhere to standards in this area - use of specific directories, naming standards, notes on a wiki or whatever? And if so what do your standards cover, how strict are they, how do you police them and so on? Or is there another solution I'm missing? [Assume for the sake of argument that the developer can not be contacted to talk through what he was doing here - even if he could knowing and describing which workspace is which from memory isn't going to be simple and flawless and sometimes people genuinely can't be contacted and I'd like a solution which covers all eventualities.]

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  • Evolution in coding standards, how do you deal with them?

    - by WardB
    How do you deal with evolution in the coding standards / style guide in a project for the existing code base? Let's say someone on your team discovered a better way of object instantiation in the programming language. It's not that the old way is bad or buggy, it's just that the new way is less verbose and feels much more elegant. And all team members really like it. Would you change all exisiting code? Let's say your codebase is about 500.000+ lines of code. Would you still want to change all existing code? Or would you only let new code adhere to the new standard? Basically lose consistency? How do you deal with an evolution in the coding standards on your project?

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  • EU Digital Agenda scores 85/100

    - by trond-arne.undheim
    If the Digital Agenda was a bottle of wine and I were wine critic Robert Parker, I would say the Digital Agenda has "a great bouquet, many good elements, with astringent, dry and puckering mouth feel that will not please everyone, but still displaying some finesse. A somewhat controlled effort with no surprises and a few noticeable flaws in the delivery. Noticeably shorter aftertaste than advertised by the producers. Score: 85/100. Enjoy now". The EU Digital Agenda states that "standards are vital for interoperability" and has a whole chapter on interoperability and standards. With this strong emphasis, there is hope the EU's outdated standardization system finally is headed for reform. It has been 23 years since the legal framework of standardisation was completed by Council Decision 87/95/EEC8 in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. Standardization is market driven. For several decades the IT industry has been developing standards and specifications in global open standards development organisations (fora/consortia), many of which have transparency procedures and practices far superior to the European Standards Organizations. The Digital Agenda rightly states: "reflecting the rise and growing importance of ICT standards developed by certain global fora and consortia". Some fora/consortia, of course, are distorted, influenced by single vendors, have poor track record, and need constant vigilance, but they are the minority. Therefore, the recognition needs to be accompanied by eligibility criteria focused on openness. Will the EU reform its ICT standardization by the end of 2010? Possibly, and only if DG Enterprise takes on board that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have driven half of the productivity growth in Europe over the past 15 years, a prominent fact in the EU's excellent Digital Competitiveness report 2010 published on Monday 17 May. It is ok to single out the ICT sector. It simply is the most important sector right now as it fuels growth in all other sectors. Let's not wait for the entire standardization package which may take another few years. Europe does not have time. The Digital Agenda is an umbrella strategy with deliveries from a host of actors across the Commission. For instance, the EU promises to issue "guidance on transparent ex-ante disclosure rules for essential intellectual property rights and licensing terms and conditions in the context of standard setting", by 2011 in the Horisontal Guidelines now out for public consultation by DG COMP and to some extent by DG ENTR's standardization policy reform. This is important. The EU will issue procurement guidance as interoperability frameworks are put into practice. This is a joint responsibility of several DGs, and is likely to suffer coordination problems, controversy and delays. We have seen plenty of the latter already and I have commented on the Commission's own interoperability elsewhere, with mixed luck. :( Yesterday, I watched the cartoonesque Korean western film The Good, the Bad and the Weird. In the movie (and I meant in the movie only), a bandit, a thief, and a bounty hunter, all excellent at whatever they do, fight for a treasure map. Whether that is a good analogy for the situation within the Commission, others are better judges of than I. However, as a movie fanatic, I still await the final shoot-out, and, as in the film, the only certainty is that "life is about chasing and being chased". The missed opportunity (in this case not following up the push from Member States to better define open standards based interoperability) is a casualty of the chaos ensued in the European Wild West (and I mean that in the most endearing sense, and my excuses beforehand to actors who possibly justifiably cannot bear being compared to fictional movie characters). Instead of exposing the ongoing fight, the EU opted for the legalistic use of the term "standards" throughout the document. This is a term that--to the EU-- excludes most standards used by the IT industry world wide. So, while it, for a moment, meant "weapon down", it will not lead to lasting peace. The Digital Agenda calls for the Member States to "Implement commitments on interoperability and standards in the Malmö and Granada Declarations by 2013". This is a far cry from the actual Ministerial Declarations which called upon the Commission to help them with this implementation by recognizing and further defining open standards based interoperability. Unless there is more forthcoming from the Commission, the market's judgement will be: you simply fall short. Generally, I think the EU focus now should be "from policy to practice" and the Digital Agenda does indeed stop short of tackling some highly practical issues. There is need for progress beyond the Digital Agenda. Here are some suggestions that would help Europe re-take global leadership on openness, public sector reform, and economic growth: A strong European software strategy centred around open standards based interoperability by 2011. An ambitious new eCommission strategy for 2011-15 focused on migration to open standards by 2015. Aligning the IT portfolio across the Commission into one Digital Agenda DG by 2012. Focusing all best practice exchange in eGovernment on one social networking site, epractice.eu (full disclosure: I had a role in getting that site up and running) Prioritizing public sector needs in global standardization over European standardization by 2014.

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  • Music While Coding [closed]

    - by inspectorG4dget
    Hi SO, Generally, while I'm coding, I prefer to listen to some background music. Nothing that'll get me distracted, but something that'll help keep the rhythm and isn't counterproductive when I need to stop coding to debug or to think of a way to solve a small problem that stands in the way of progress. Now, I have read some similar questions on reddit and on SO - specifically: which songs do you find most productive to listen to while coding, Music while programming and more. Sadly a lot of these questions were closed as off-topic, etc. But (1) I don't think this question is off-topic and I think that a lot of programmers can benefit from it. (2) It's a real question. I really want to know what music you guys would recommend because music helps when I'm coding. It's sad that SO: Music to listen to while coding cannot be found and this isn't of much help. I hope this doesn't get closed. PS: I want to turn this into a community wiki, but I don't seem to know how. I'd appreciate any help. Thank you, all. In response to kirk.burleson's comment: In case the question isn't already clear, I'm asking for recommendations/opinions of music to listen to while coding. I would like to know what you listen to when you code so that I can try it too. I am running out of good "coding music" and this is a problem for me because good "coding music" helps me code better.

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  • Coding standards in programming?

    - by vicky
    I am an WordPress Plugin Developer. I am not sure how to follow the coding standard while creating a plugin of wordpress. I check with some of the plugins like woocommerce and All in one SEO Plugin in that they are maintaining the proper coding standard. Basically I am Using the NetBeans IDE. Is it possible to make the proper space and coding standards in that IDE. I am Wondering to View his code is very neat and clean. How can i do this or how they are maintaining this. Anyone suggest me to make the wordpress plugin with well coding standards. Thanks, vicky

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  • Handling Coding Standards at Work (I'm not the boss)

    - by Josh Johnson
    I work on a small team, around 10 devs. We have no coding standards at all. There are certain things that have become the norm but some ways of doing things are completely disparate. My big one is indentation. Some use tabs, some use spaces, some use a different number of spaces, which creates a huge problem. I often end up with conflicts when I merge because someone used their IDE to auto format and they use a different character to indent than I do. I don't care which we use I just want us all to use the same one. Or else I'll open a file and some lines have curly brackets on the same line as the condition while others have them on the next line. Again, I don't mind which one so long as they are all the same. I've brought up the issue of standards to my direct manager, one on one and in group meetings, and he is not overly concerned about it (there are several others who share the same view as myself). I brought up my specific concern about indentation characters and he thought a better solution would be to, "create some kind of script that could convert all that when we push/pull from the repo." I suspect that he doesn't want to change and this solution seems overly complicated and prone to maintenance issues down the road (also, this addresses only one manifestation of a larger issue). Have any of you run into a similar situation at work? If so, how did you handle it? What would be some good points to help sell my boss on standards? Would starting a grass roots movement to create coding standards, among those of us who are interested, be a good idea? Am I being too particular, should I just let it go? Thank you all for your time. Note: Thanks everyone for the great feedback so far! To be clear, I don't want to dictate One Style To Rule Them All. I'm willing to concede my preferred way of doing something in favor of what suits everyone the best. I want consistency and I want this to be a democracy. I want it to be a group decision that everyone agrees on. True, not everyone will get their way, but I'm hoping that everyone will be mature enough to compromise for the betterment of the group. Note 2: Some people are getting caught up in the two examples I gave above. I'm more after the heart of the matter. It manifests itself with many examples: naming conventions, huge functions that should be broken up, should something go in a util or service, should something be a constant or injected, should we all use different versions of a dependency or the same, should an interface be used for this case, how should unit tests be set up, what should be unit tested, (Java specific) should we use annotations or external config. I could go on.

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  • How to learn what the industry standards/expectations are, particularly with security?

    - by Aerovistae
    For instance, I was making my first mobile web-application about a year ago, and half-way through, someone pointed me to jQuery Mobile. Obviously this induced a total revolution in my app. Rewrote everything. Now, if you're in the field long enough, maybe that seems like common knowledge, but I was totally new to it. But this set me wondering: there are so many libraries and extensions and frameworks. This seems particularly crucial in the category of security. I'm afraid I'm going to find myself doing something in a professional setting eventually (I'm still a student) and someone's going to walk over and be like, My god, you're trying to secure user data that way? Don't you know about the Gordon-Wokker crypto-magic-hash-algorithms library? Without it you may as well go plaintext. How do you know what the best ways are to maximize security? Especially if you're trying to develop something on your own...

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  • What standards to use in Business Process Modelling?

    - by user1268690
    There are several approaches on how to model a business process in software applications (BPM software). For instance, a processes can be described in BPMN, EPC, IDEF0, SOMF, etc. Additionally, different process execution languages such as BPEL, RPC, Wf-XML are available. If I were to develop software for the BPM-market, which standards should I implement or focus on? Which standards are most suitable if my BPM software was going to be implemented in my client's IT-System?

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  • Is a coding standard even needed any more?

    - by SomeKittens
    I know that it's been proven that a coding standard helps enormously. However, there are many different tools and IDEs that will format to whatever standard the programmer prefers. So long as the code's neat/commented (and not a spaghetti mess), I don't see the need for a coding standard. Are there any arguments for the development of a coding standard (we don't have one, but I was looking into creating one)?

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  • Is a coding standard even needed anymore?

    - by SomeKittens
    I know that it's been proven that a coding standard helps enormously. However, there are many different tools and IDEs that will format to whatever standard the programmer prefers. So long as the code's neat/commented (and not a spaghetti mess), I don't see the need for a coding standard. Are there any arguments for the development of a coding standard (we don't have one, but I was looking into creating one)?

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  • Environment naming standards in software development?

    - by Marcus_33
    My project is currently suffering from environment naming issues. Different people have different assumptions as to what environments should be named or what the names designate, and it's causing confusion when discussing them. I've done a bit of research and I haven't found any standards out there. The terms include "Local", "Sand", "Dev", "Test", "User", "QA", "Staging" and "Prod" (plus a few more that different people have asked about) I'm not looking for just opinions, though if there's one out there that "everyone" has I'll take it - I'm trying to find definitions advanced by some sort of authority, even if it's unofficial. Here's the environments we currently use: Environment on the developer's PC Shared Environment where developers directly upload code to self-test Shared Environment where standards and functionality are tested by QA people Shared Environment where completed and QA-checked code is approved by project requesters Environment that mirrors the final environment as a final check and to prepare for deployment Final Environment where code is in use I know what I'd call them, but is there some sort of standard on this? Thanks in advance.

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  • C# coding standards” Use the const directive only on natural constants

    - by Nathan Wilfert
    I've seen these 2 guidelines in coding c# standard and I’m not sure the what the 2nd one means. With the exception of zero and one, never hard-code a numeric value; always declare a constant instead. Use the const directive only on natural constants such as the number of days of the week. 1st what is the definition of a natural constants and if the number is not a natural constants given the 1st rule how does one declare a constant in c# without the const directive? See http://www.scribd.com/doc/10731655/IDesign-C-Coding-Standard-232 for reference.

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