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• Representation of data in application versus database

  - by user1815201

  I'm going to make an application that will be given data to put in a database. The data will for the most part be the same, but the way it is formatted will vary a lot (could be in anything from text files to .xls to .doc). I'm not a very experienced developer, but I can see some potential issues and I want to minimize them. First off I have decided to use the DAO pattern, so that I can easily support new file formats or file suddenly formatted in different ways. What I really wonder about though, is how I should manage the data itself within my application. I'm thinking that the database DAO should have models representing each table of the database with the same relations between them, to make the uploading process easy. But should the filesystem DAO's have to use the same models? I can imaging that when the database changes, the change will suddenly propagate throughout the entire system, all DAOs and models alike. And that is obviously a bad thing. I'm a little bit tired and out of time. Will update with what ever questions you have. Thanks!

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• How are events in games handled?

  - by Alex

  In may games that I have played, I have seen events being triggered, such as when you walk into a certain land area while holding a specific object, it will trigger a special creature to spawn. I was wondering, how do games deal with events such as this? Not in a specific game, but in general among games. The first thought I had was that each place has a hard-coded set of events that it will call when something happens there. However, that would be too inefficient to maintain, as when something new is added, that would require modification of every part of the game that would potentially cause the event to be called. Next up, I had the idea of maybe how GUI programming works. In all of the GUI programming I've done, you create a component and a callback function, or a listener. Then, when the user interacts when the button, the callback function is called, allowing you to do something with it. So, I was thinking that in terms of a game, when a land area gets loaded the game loops over a list of all events, creating instances of them and calling public methods to bind them to the current scene. The events themselves then handle what scene it is, and if it is a scene that pertains to the event, will call the public method of the scene to bind the event to an action. Then, when the action takes place, the scene would call all events that are bound to that action. However, I'm sure that's not how games would operate either, as that would require a lot of creating of events all the time. So how to video games handle events, are either of those methods correct, or is it something completely different?

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• If not gamedev, what do I do !

  - by brainydexter

  Hi, I am a game dev who was working in the game-industry and then..got laid off. Ever since then, life couldn't get less stressful! During this time, I have met so many other devs who have also been laid off irrespective of the number of years they have been in the game. Now, the problem really gets worse, since I am not a US citizen (yes, I am in US) , and am on an international visa here, I might have to soon pack my bags and go back to my native country. Going back is not bad at all, apart from the fact, that gamedev is still in a very nascent stage there. There just aren't many opportunities. So, employment is the key to maintain a valid visa status. After giving it a lot of thought, I am thinking of staying away from gamedev jobs for the time being, given its job unstablity. This brings me to my current problem. I can't think of a domain/place where I can use my game development skills. I know graphics/simulation/visualization is huge, but I can't think straight and am left clueless where to go from here. What are some of the domains/companies where I can use my skills ? I'd appreciate any insight on this (and I apologize if this is not the place to post this kind of a question).

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• How to advocate Stack Overflow at work

  - by Gordon

  I am thinking of doing a short presentation at work about using Stack Overflow as a resource for your day job. What is the experience doing this? Would you deem it a valid resource to tell you colleagues about or is it similar to telling them about Google as a resource? Is there a better way of doing it? I was leaning toward asking questions side of Stack Overflow rather than answering them to avoid you-shouldn't-be-doing-this-on-work-time argument. Just as a follow up. Originally I didn't want to make the question to specific to my own case. My presentation will only be a quick four minute talk, which I will repeat over an hour to different groups. I may ask a question before the talk on Stack Overflow and refer to it during the presentation. Hopefully I will get some activity during the hour. I am also going to talk briefly about some of the other Stack Exchange sites that would fit the audience as they are not all developers. I think Super User, Server Fault and Programmers should work well. I will not be doing the presentation for another couple of months as it has be rescheduled, but I will update on how I got on.

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• Is it possible to implement an infinite IEnumerable without using yield with only C# code?

  - by sinelaw

  This isn't a practical problem, it's more of a riddle. Problem I'm curious to know if there's a way to implement something equivalent to the following, but without using yield: IEnumerable<T> Infinite<T>() { while (true) { yield return default(T); } } Rules You can't use the yield keyword Use only C# itself directly - no IL code, no constructing dynamic assemblies etc. You can only use the basic .NET lib (only mscorlib.dll, System.Core.dll? not sure what else to include). However if you find a solution with some of the other .NET assemblies (WPF?!), I'm also interested. Don't implement IEnumerable or IEnumerator. Notes The closest I've come yet: IEnumerable<int> infinite = null; infinite = new int[1].SelectMany(x => new int[1].Concat(infinite)); This is "correct" but hits a StackOverflowException after 14399 iterations through the enumerable (not quite infinite). I'm thinking there might be no way to do this due to the CLR's lack of tail recursion optimization. A proof would be nice :)

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• Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2 link + webcasts for developers

  - by Eric Nelson

  At Web Directions last week in London (10th and 11th June 2010) I promised several folks I would put up a blog post to more information on IE 9.0. True to my word (albeit a little later than I had hoped), here is what I was thinking of: Install First up, Install Preview 2 and try out the demos I was showing at the conference. Remember that IE9 Preview installs side by side with IE8/7 etc. It is not a beta nor is it intended to be a full browser. It is a … preview :-)   Including good old SVG-oids :-) Learn And then check out the following webcasts which were recorded in March this year at MIX: In-Depth Look At Internet Explorer 9 Presenter:  Ted Johnson & John Hrvatin VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL28 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV High Performance Best Practices For Web Sites Presenter: Jason Weber VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL29 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV HTML5: Cross Browser Best Practices Presenter: Tony Ross VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL27 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Internet Explorer Developer Tools Presenter: Jon Seitel VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT51 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV SVG: The Past, Present And Future of Vector Graphics For The Web Presenter: Patrick Dengler, Doug Schepers VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX30 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV Day 2 Keynote containing IE9 Presenter: Dean Hachamovitch VisitMIX URL: http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02 Slides: Download Videos: MP4 Small WMV Large WMV

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• Python web frameworks comparisons

  - by stupidLearner

  I recently asked a question on SO about Python web frameworks: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4909306/python-web-frameworks-vs-java-web-frameworks-how-is-web-development-in-python-do I want to learn one just for fun but it also has to be able to help me deliver a proper working application. I am looking for a framework with lots of features, powerful, mature, with large community, good documentation, books etc. I need something that will help me be more productive in developing my app and not waste time figuring out how to do a certain thing in the framework or how to write workaround around the limitations of the framework. I was thinking one of the following: django, zope, turbogears, pylons. Off course the war is raging out there and there are other alternatives but seems Django is at the top... or is it just hype? I am interested in pros and cons of each. What was the best feature you think the framework has? What is the thing it lacks? What could have been done differently. Help me chose one to learn for starters.

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• Which tools you use for development in your company?…Please be exact [closed]

  - by predrag.music

  If you are a professional php/(my/postgre/?)sql/? developer and working in a professional team ... I would like to know which tools you use for development in your company. I do not care which tool is better or worse, but "which tools you use", if it is not a TOP SECRET :) For example, these are just some of the tools i/we use (first those used most (in general)): Pen, paper lots of cofee, cola ... let me think ... mmmm ... yeah more cofee :) All kinds of books (a lots of books) OS: Win / MacOS X Server: Hosted (CentOS )/ At work Mac OS X Dev server: XAMPP / MAMP / LAMP Editor: Notepad++ IDE: Netbeans / Zend Studio / Eclipse Version Control System: Mercurial / SVN FTP: Filezilla mostly / ... Passwords: KeePass js / ajax: jQuery / pure js / jQuery UI Framework:CI / Zend / pure php Database: MySQL / Other ORM: Framework layer db (Not an ORM I know but...) / Doctrine (2) / no ORM Debugging: Xdebug (PHP) / firebug (ajax/js/html/css/...) / framework profiler (stuff) / ... (x) Dreaming: About... Thinking: Not about chaos in ? direction .... n Anything else that comes to mind n+1 Zilion other stuff i know but i can't remember ... 8 some other stuff i (don't) remember i forgot, give up, delete, lost, said to myself never again, i haven't had time stuff, have on computer stuff but can't find or don't even know i have it on my computer at least 2-3 or more times, stuff I said to myself i'll check later and never checked again for all sort of "perfectly justified" reasons (time, memory, wife :), whatever,...), ... what is the reason i'm asking this?:) 8 and beyond looking forward to see a lot of answers ?

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• Inevitable Corporate Bureaucracy

  - by Ahsan Alam

  Top executives of most smaller organizations want their companies to be different from the larger corporations. They want their organizations smaller in size; but bigger in productivity by eliminating red tapes and corporate bureaucracy. When the company is smaller, people often work like firefighters – taking on new business and technology challenges without thinking about any procedures and guidelines. People also tend to wear many hats to accomplish tasks quickly in order to integrate new businesses. For example, software developers in smaller organizations may take on responsibilities of client interactions, requirements gathering, design and development, code deployment, production support, network infrastructure support, database design and maintenance along with countless other duties. In addition, systems in smaller organizations tend to be loosely guarded. So, people often don't follow many procedures in order to setup environments and implement technical projects. It's not uncommon to change code and deploy without anyone realizing. Similarly, business requirements may also get defined in an informal manner without any type of documentation. As the company grows, everything starts to change significantly impacting people and the overall business process. Suddenly, following procedures become extremely important. Consequently, new roles, guidelines and procedures start to emerge. Everything from business process to technology implementation start to become more and more process oriented. Organizations start to define and document steps, invent procedure to track process and systems level changes, and start restricting access to various systems for security reasons. At the same time, as a growing company start doing businesses with larger clienteles, they are automatically forced to abide by all sorts of industry compliance laws. Moreover, growing companies tend to recruit experienced individuals to fill new roles who usually bring their expertise from larger and more bureaucratic organizations.   Despite the best efforts from the top executives, it seems increased number of procedures and guidelines as well as new recruits automatically contribute to the evolution of corporate bureaucracy. Maybe, corporate bureaucracy is an inevitable side effect of a growing organization.

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• Tell me what&rsquo;s wrong! &ndash; An XNA sample demonstrating exception handling and reporting in

  - by George Clingerman

  I’ve always enjoyed using Nick Gravelyn’s exception handling in all of my games. You’re always going to encounter those unhandled exception that your players are going to ferret out and having a method to display them rather than just crashing to the dashboard is definitely more of an elegant solution. But the other day I got to thinking…what if we could do more? What if instead of just displaying the error, we could encourage the players to send us the error. So I started playing with that an expanding upon Nick’s sample code to see what I could come up with. I got close to what I envisioned, but unfortunately there were some limitations to just what the XNA API could do. In my head I was picturing the players hitting “Send Message” and a 360 message would just be sent to the XBLIG developer. Unfortunately, you can only send messages in an XNA game to someone you’re currently in a network session with. Since I didn’t want to have a 360 server running all the time, virally connecting to players just to get error messages, I did the next best thing and just open up a 360 message and encourage them to manually enter the gamertag. Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that a little better, but this works for now. In the sample, players can hit the “A” button or key to generate in an exception. If the debugger is not attached, then the Exception message screen will be shown explaining what has happened and giving the player a chance to send a 360 message to the gamertag provided or maybe even just send an email. Nick’s code has been changed just a bit. It now accepts any PlayerIndex (no longer hard coded to just PlayerIndex.One) and it no longer uses a MessageBox to get the users selection. The code has also been modified so that it works both for the 360 and for the PC. Check out “Tell me what’s wrong!” and let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions. I really do appreciate the feedback.

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• SEO for Country & Language Specific content.

  - by kecebongsoft

  Currently I am creating a website which has a common topic for an article, but it's going to be different content for each country, and also, each of that content will be provided in several languages. And this mechanism exists in most of the parts in the website. For example, I have an article about tax. This article has to be different for each country, for example china. And tax content for china should be written in china AND english language (for non china-speaker). What is the best URL pattern to handle this? What I've been thinking is, using a sub folder (/country-code/language-code/) such as: www.example.com/cn/cn/tax www.example.com/cn/en/tax Or using top level domain such as: www.example.cn/cn/tax www.example.cn/en/tax Or subdomain such as cn.example.com/cn/tax cn.example.com/en/tax I think I will not prefer the last option since I might need to use subdomain for other purpose. Which left only subfolder and TLDN. I've read some articles saying that TLDN is good for localized content (language-specific content), but in my case, my TLDN will also has english contents (for non local speaker) which is specific only to that particular country (also the purpose of this is to let people from other country easily search it through google). What is the best pattern to pick and why?.

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• how do I write a functional specification quickly and efficiently

  - by giddy

  So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but Im looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. Im the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made something this serious, I started out writing something like a bad spec, an overview of some sorts, and it has wasted a LOT of my time. Ive also made 3 mockup-kinda-thingies for my client so I have a good understanding of what they want. Also released a preview (a throw away working app with the most basic workflow), and Ive only written and tested some of the very core/base systems. I think the mistake Ive been making so far is not writing a detailed spec, so Im getting to it now. So the whole thing comprises of An MVC website (for admins & data viewing) 2 Silverlight modules (For 2 specific tasks) 1 Desktop Application Im totally short on time, resources and need to get this done quick, also, need to make sure these guys read it up equally quick and painlessly. So how do I go about it, Im looking for any tips, any real world stuff, how do you guys usually do it? Do you make a mock screenie of every dialog/form/page? Im thinking of making a dummy asp.net web forms project, then filling in html files in folders and making it look like my mvc url structure. Then having a section in the spec for the website and write up a page for every URL Ive got with a screenie. For my win forms app, Ive made somewhat of a demo Win Form project, would I then put in a dialog or stucture everything as I would in the real app and then screen shot it?

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• Teaching myself, as a physicist, to become a better programmer

  - by user787267

  I've always liked physics, and I've always liked coding, so when I got the offer for a PhD position doing numerical physics (details are not relevant, it's mostly parallel programming for a cluster) at a university, it was a no-brainer for me. However, as most physicists, I'm self taught. I don't have broad background knowledge about how to code in an object oriented way, or the name of that specific algorithm that optimizes the search in some kD tree. Since all my work so far has been more concerned about the physics and the scientific results, I undoubtedly have some bad habits - more so because my coding is my own, and not really teamwork. I have mostly used C since it is very straightforward and "what you write is what you get" - no need for fancy abstractions. However, I have recently switched to C++ since I'd like to learn more about the power that comes with abstraction, and it's pretty C-like (syntax-wise at least). How do I teach myself to code in a good, abstract way like a graduate in computer science? I know my code is efficient, but I want it to be elegant as well, and readable. Keep in mind that I don't have time to read several 1000-page tomes about abstract programming. I need to spend time on actual, physics related research (my supervisor would laugh at me if he knew I spent time thinking about how to program elegantly). How do I assess if my work is also good from a programmer's perspective?

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• Writing cross-platforms Types, Interfaces and Classes/Methods in C++

  - by user827992

  I'm looking for the best solution to write cross-platform software, aka code that I write and that I have to interface with different libraries and platforms each time. What I consider the easiest part, correct me if I'm wrong, is the definition of new types, all I have to do is to write an hpp file with a list of typedefs, I can keep the same names for each new type across the different platforms so my codebase can be shared without any problem. typedefs also helps me to redefine a better scope for my types in my code. I will probably end up having something like this: include |-windows | |-types.hpp |-linux | |-types.hpp |-mac |-types.hpp For the interfaces I'm thinking about the same solution used for the types, a series of hpp files, probably I will write all the interfaces only once since they rely on the types and all "cross-platform portability" is ensured by the work done on the types. include | |-interfaces.hpp | |-windows | |-types.hpp |-linux | |-types.hpp |-mac | |-types.hpp For classes and methods I do not have a real answer, I would like to avoid 2 things: the explicit use of pointers the use of templates I want to avoid the use of the pointers because they can make the code less readable for someone and I want to avoid templates just because if I write them, I can't separate the interface from the definition. What is the best option to hide the use of the pointers? I would also like some words about macros and how to implement some OS-specifics calls and definitions.

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• Getting into driver development for linux [closed]

  - by user1103966

  Right now, I've been learning about writing device-drivers for linux 3.2 kernel for about 2 months. So far I have been able program simple char drivers that only read and write to a fictitious dev structure like a file, but now I'm moving to more advance concepts. The new material I've learned about includes I/O port manipulation, memory management, and interrupts. I feel that I have a basic understanding of overall driver operation but, there is still so much that I don't know. My question is this, given that I have the basic theory of how to write a dev-driver for a piece of hardware ... how long would it take to actually develop the skills of writing actual software that companies would want to employ? I plan on getting involved in an open-source project and building a portfolio. Also what type of beginner drivers could I write for hardware that would best help me develop my skills? I was thinking that taking on a project where I design my own key logger would easy and a good assignment to help me understand how IO ports and interrupts are used. I may want to eventually specialize in writing software for video cards or network devices though these devices seem beyond my understanding at the moment. Thanks for any help

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• What are my options for sharing music between Windows & Ubuntu on the same network?

  - by jgbelacqua

  We have a few Windows(XP & 7) and Ubuntu machines in the house sharing a wireless connection, and want to share music between them. If possible, I would like to be able to serve music from both Windows and Ubuntu (but it doesn't have to be the same time). I don't know much about sharing folders or streaming, but I'm guessing both would be options (that is, using a local client to access a shared song or a local client to access a shared stream). I want to be able to share the music between the systems as simply as possible. Bonus points (but not requirements) for cross-platform -- same application on both Windows and Ubuntu? available on startup (via daemon or autostart or whatnot) open source More info: All systems have dynamic addresses (DHCP) supplied from the ISP-supplied wireless router. There are several Gigabytes of music on one Windows XP box and one Ubuntu 10.10 The music is not well-sorted (I'm thinking this might have an impact on UI usability). Only has to be available internally (private address space behind the wireless router) bandwidth is not a problem We don't have (legitimate) admin access to the wireless router

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• How to build MVC Views that work with polymorphic domain model design?

  - by Johann de Swardt

  This is more of a "how would you do it" type of question. The application I'm working on is an ASP.NET MVC4 app using Razor syntax. I've got a nice domain model which has a few polymorphic classes, awesome to work with in the code, but I have a few questions regarding the MVC front-end. Views are easy to build for normal classes, but when it comes to the polymorphic ones I'm stuck on deciding how to implement them. The one (ugly) option is to build a page which handles the base type (eg. IContract) and has a bunch of if statements to check if we passed in a IServiceContract or ISupplyContract instance. Not pretty and very nasty to maintain. The other option is to build a view for each of these IContract child classes, breaking DRY principles completely. Don't like doing this for obvious reasons. Another option (also not great) is to split the view into chunks with partials and build partial views for each of the child types that are loaded into the main view for the base type, then deciding to show or hide the partial in a single if statement in the partial. Also messy. I've also been thinking about building a master page with sections for the fields that only occur in subclasses and to build views for each subclass referencing the master page. This looks like the least problematic solution? It will allow for fairly simple maintenance and it doesn't involve code duplication. What are your thoughts? Am I missing something obvious that will make our lives easier? Suggestions?

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• XNA Required information to represent 2D Sprite graphically

  - by Fire-Dragon-DoL

  I was thinking about dividing my game engine into 2 threads: render thread and update thread (I can't come up on how to divide update thread from physic thread at the moment). That said, I have to duplicate all Sprite informations, what do I really need to represents a 2D Sprite graphically? Here are my ideas (I'll mark with ? things that I'm not sure): Vector2 Position float Rotation ? Vector2 Pivot ? Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Vector2 ImageOrigin ? (is it tracked somewhere else?) If you have any suggestion about using different types for datas, it's appreciated Last part of the question: isn't this a lot of data to copy in a buffer?what should I really copy in the buffer?I'm following this tutorial: http://www.sgtconker.com/2009/11/article-multi-threading-your-xna/3/ Thanks UPDATE 1: Newer values at the moment: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color byte Facing (can be left or right, I'll do it with an enum) I re-read the tutorial, what I was doing wrong is not that I need to pass all those values, I need to pass only changed values as messages. UPDATE 2: Vector2 Position float Rotation Vector2 Pivot Rectangle TextureRectangle Texture2D Texture Color Color bool Flip uint DrawOrder Vector2 Scale bool Visible ? Mhhh, should Visibile be included?

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• Security vulnerability and nda's [closed]

  - by Chris

  I want to propose a situation and gain insight from the communities thoughts. A customer, call them Customer X has a contract with a vendor, Vendor Y to provide an application and services. Customer X discovers a serious authentication vulnerability in Vendor Y's software. Vendor Y and Customer X has a discussion. Vendor Y acknowledges/confirms flaw. Vendor Y confirms they will put effort to fix. Customer X requests Vendor Y to inform all customers impacted by this. Vendor agrees. Fast forward 2 months, and the flaw has not been fixed. Patches were applied to mitigate but the flaw still exists. However, no customers were informed of issue. At this point customer X contacts Vendor Y to determine the status and understand why customer's were not informed. The vendor nicely reminds the customer they are under an NDA and are still working on the issue. A few questions/discussion pieces out of this. By discussing a software flaw with a vendor, does this imply you have agreed to any type of NDA disclosure? Additionally, what rights as does Customer X have to inform other customers of this vulnerability if vendor does not appear willing to comply? I (the op) am under the impression that when this situation occurs, you are supposed to notify vendor of issue, provide them with ample time to respond and if no response you are able to do what you wish with the information. I am thinking back to the MIT/subway incident where they contacted transit authorities, transit authorities didn't respond in a timely fashion so the students disclosed the information publicly on their own. Few things to note about this: I am not the customer in above situation, also lets assume for purposes of keeping discussion inline that customer X has no intentions of disclosing information, they are merely concerned and interested in making sure other customers are aware until it is fixed so they do not expierence a major security breach. (More information can be supplied if needed to add context to question. )

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• Policy Administration is the Top 2011 IT Priority for Insurers

  - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com

  The current issue of Insurance Networking News includes an interesting column by Novarica's Matt Josefowicz.  Recent research by the firm revealed that policy administration replacement or extension is the most common strategic IT project for insurers this year.  The article goes on to note that insurers are keenly focused on the business capabilities that can be delivered once the system is in production as well as the ability to leverage agile development methodologies and true business/IT collaboration during implementation. The results are not too surprising given that policy administration is a mission-critical system for life and annuity insurers.  As Josefowicz notes, "Core systems are called core for a reason--they are at the heart of the insurer's ability to function.  Replacing them is not to be done lightly, but failing to replace them can mean diminishing the ability to compete or function effectively as a company." Insurers can no longer rely on inflexible policy administration systems that impede their ability to rapidly configure and bring to innovative new products, add riders, support changing business processes and take advantage of market opportunities.  The ability to leverage the policy administration systems to better service customers and distribution channels by providing real-time access to policy information throughout the policy lifecycle is also critical to sustain loyalty and further fuel growth.Insurers can benefit from a modern, adaptive policy administration system, like Oracle Insurance Policy Administration for Life and Annuity.  You can learn more about the industry's most highly advanced, rules-based system, which is unmatched for its highly flexible, rules-based configurability, performance and extensibility, as well as global market industry trends by viewing a complimentary, on-demand Webcast, Adapt, Transform and Grow:  Accelerate Speed to Market with Adaptive Insurance Policy Administration.Data conversions can be a daunting process for many insurers when deciding to modernize, in particular when consolidating from multiple, disparate legacy policy administration systems to a single new platform.  Migrating from a legacy system requires a well-thought out approach that builds on the industry's best thinking from previous modernization efforts and takes data migration off the critical path by leveraging proven methodology and tools to capitalize on the new system's capabilities.  We'll discuss more about this approach in a future Oracle Insurance blog.Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance's life and annuities solutions.

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• How can I support objects larger than a single tile in a 2D tile engine?

  - by Yheeky

  I´m currently working on a 2D Engine containing an isometric tile map. It´s running quite well but I'm not sure if I´ve chosen the best approach for that kind of engine. To give you an idea what I´m thinking about right now, let's have a look at a basic object for a tile map and its objects: public class TileMap { public List<MapRow> Rows = new List<MapRow>(); public int MapWidth = 50; public int MapHeight = 50; } public class MapRow { public List<MapCell> Columns = new List<MapCell>(); } public class MapCell { public int TileID { get; set; } } Having those objects it's just possible to assign a tile to a single MapCell. What I want my engine to support is like having groups of MapCells since I would like to add objects to my tile map (e.g. a house with a size of 2x2 tiles). How should I do that? Should I edit my MapCell object that it may has a reference to other related tiles and how can I find an object while clicking on single MapCells? Or should I do another approach using a global container with all objects in it?

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• Part 3: Customization Strategy or how long does it take

  - by volker.eckardt(at)oracle.com

  The previous part in this blog should have made us aware, that many procedures are required to manage all these steps. To review your status let me ask you a question:What is your Customization Strategy?Your answer might be something like, 'customization strategy, well, we have standards and we let requirement documents approve'.Let me ask you another question:How long does it take to redeploy all your customizations into a fresh installation?In 90% of all installations the answer to this question would be: we can't!Although no one would have to do it (hopefully), just thinking about it and recognizing that we have today too many manual steps involved, different procedures and sometimes (undocumented) manual steps to complete a customization installation. And ... in general too many customizations.Why is working with customizations often so complicated and time consuming?Here are the key reasons as I have identified them in my projects:Customization standards defined, but not maintainedDifferent knowledge on developer side (results getting an individual developer touch)No need to automate deployment (not forced by client)Different documentation styles, not easy to hand over to someone elseDifferent development concepts, difficult for the maintenanceJust the minimum present for testing, often positive testing onlyDeviations from naming conventions accepted, although definedComplicated procedures, therefore sometimes partially ignoredAnd last but not least, hand made version control (still)If you would have to 'redeploy all your customizations' you would have to Follow all your own standards and best practiceTrack deviations and define corrective tasksAutomate as much as possible, minimize manual tasksDo not allow any change coming in without version controlUtilize products to support you in deploymentMinimize hand made scripts and extensive documentationReview regularly used techniques to guarantee that all are in line with the current release and also easy maintainableCreate solution libraries and force the team to contribute and reuseDefine quality activities and execute themDefine a procedure to release customizationsI know, it is easy to write down, but much harder to manage. Will provide some guidelines in my next blog.Volker

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• Representing and executing simple rules - framework or custom?

  - by qtips

  I am creating a system where users will be able to subscribe to events, and get notified when the event has occured. Example of events can be phone call durations and costs, phone data traffic notations, and even stock rate changes. Example of events: customer 13532 completed a call with duration 11:45 min and cost $0.4 stock rate for Google decreased with 0.01% Customers can subscribe to events using some simple rules e.g. When stock rate of Google decreases more than 0.5% When the cost of a call of my subscription is over $1 Now, as the set of different rules is currently predefined, I can easily create a custom implemention that applies rules to an event. But if the set of rules could be much larger, and if we also allow for custom rules (e.g. when stock rate of Google decreses more than 0.5% AND stock rate of Apple increases with 0.5%), the system should be able to adapt. I am therefore thinking of a system that can interpret rules using a simple grammer and then apply them. After som research I found that there exists rule-based engines that can be used, but I am unsure as they seem too complicated and may be a little overkill for my situation. Is there a Java framework suited for this area? Should we use framework, a rule engine, or should we create something custom? What are the pros and cons?

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• Distinction between API and frontend-backend

  - by Jason

  I'm trying to write a "standard" business web site. By "standard", I mean this site runs the usual HTML5, CSS and Javascript for the front-end, a back-end (to process stuff), and runs MySQL for the database. It's a basic CRUD site: the front-end just makes pretty whatever the database has in store; the backend writes to the database whatever the user enters and does some processing. Just like most sites out there. In creating my Github repositories to begin coding, I've realized I don't understand the distinction between the front-end back-end, and the API. Another way of phrasing my question is: where does the API come into this picture? I'm going to list some more details and then questions I have - hopefully this gives you guys a better idea of what my actual question is, because I'm so confused that I don't know the specific question to ask. Some more details: I'd like to try the Model-View-Controller pattern. I don't know if this changes the question/answer. The API will be RESTful I'd like my back-end to use my own API instead of allowing the back-end to cheat and call special queries. I think this style is more consistent. My questions: Does the front-end call the back-end which calls the API? Or does the front-end just call the API instead of calling the back-end? Does the back-end just execute an API and the API returns control to the back-end (where the back-end acts as the ultimate controller, delegating tasks)? Long and detailed answers explaining the role of the API alongside the front-end back-end are encouraged. If the answer depends on the model of programming (models other than the Model-View-Controller pattern), please describe these other ways of thinking of the API. Thanks. I'm very confused.

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• Programming as a minor

  - by Tomas Cokis

  Hello Everyone! I've never asked a question here at programmers, and for reasons which will become obvious later I've never answered one here, but I do poke around in short bursts. Anyway, I'm 15 right now, and I've been programming in C++ for 4 years, just working on my own projects that are aim so high as to never be finished. I've been working on a single project for the last year, and every 3 months, I add a new system into it. It might be a value tabling directory enabled log system, or a render system, or a class to load up xml files, whatever it is, I don't mind too much that the overall project (a 3d engine) isn't ever going to get finished, I just get some satisfaction from getting what I have done building and running. I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, although I suspect I'll go into some form of engineering, but I was interested in knowing if I do choose to go into a career as a developer, what kind of material I could look at to push myself up and get myself experience that might help my career later. I'm not talking about books in particular, I'm more interested in subjects areas that will get me access to good job opportunities, or that will give me a hand-up if I do computer science and software related courses at uni. One of the things I was thinking of doing was designing some of the logic gate components of a small computer - which I started briefly over the holidays, working out integer addition, subtraction and multiplication. That kind of stuff interests me, but is it really useful - or more useful then just more programming? But anyway, Any advice? Should I continue on my perpetual 3d engine? Are there any other projects or particular accomplishments that would help my education? Perhaps I should mention that I live in Perth, Australia, so local software companies are likely to be more scarce then usual.

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