Search Results

Search found 23473 results on 939 pages for 'game programming'.

Page 166/939 | < Previous Page | 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173  | Next Page >

• Which is more important in a web application code promotion hierarchy? production environment to repo equivalence or unidirectional propagation?

  - by ghbarratt

  Lets say you have a code promotion hierarchy consisting of several environments, (the polar end) two of which are development (dev) and production (prod). Lets say you also have a web application where important (but not developer controlled) files are created (and perhaps altered) in the production environment. Lets say that you (or someone above you) decided that the files which are controlled/created/altered/deleted in the production environment needed to go into the repository. Which of the following two sets of practice / approaches do you find best: Committing these non-developed file modifications made in the production environment so that the repository reflects the production environment as closely and as often as possible. Generally ignoring the non-developed production environment alterations, placing confidence in backups to restore the production environment should it be harmed, and keeping a resolution to avoid pushing developments through the promotion hierarchy in the reverse direction (avoiding pushing from prod to dev), only committing the files found in the production environment if they were absolutely necessary in other environments for development. So, 1 or 2, and why? PS - I am currently slightly biased toward maintaining production environment to repository equivalence (option 1), but I keep an open mind and would accept an answer supporting either.

  Read the article

• How do you navigate and refactor code written in a dynamic language?

  - by Philippe Beaudoin

  I love that writing Python, Ruby or Javascript requires so little boilerplate. I love simple functional constructs. I love the clean and simple syntax. However, there are three things I'm really bad at when developing a large software in a dynamic language: Navigating the code Identifying the interfaces of the objects I'm using Refactoring efficiently I have been trying simple editors (i.e. Vim) as well as IDE (Eclipse + PyDev) but in both cases I feel like I have to commit a lot more to memory and/or to constantly "grep" and read through the code to identify the interfaces. As for refactoring, for example changing method names, it becomes hugely dependent on the quality of my unit tests. And if I try to isolate my unit tests by "cutting them off" the rest of the application, then there is no guarantee that my stub's interface stays up to date with the object I'm stubbing. I'm sure there are workarounds for these problems. How do you work efficiently in Python, Ruby or Javascript?

  Read the article

• Hard Copies VS Soft Copies

  - by Garet Claborn

  Where do you draw the line and say, "OK, I'm actually going to print out this piece of code, spec, formula, or other info and carry it around but these pieces can stay on disk." Well, more importantly why do you draw the line there? I've encountered this a number of times and have some sort of vague conceptions beyond "oh now I'm REALLY stuck, better print this out." I've also found some quicksheets of basic specs to be handy. Really though, I have no particular logic behind what is useful to physically have available in the design and development process. I have a great pile of 'stuff' papers that seemed at least partially relevant at the time, but I only really use about a third of them ever and often end up wishing I had different info on hand. Edit: So this is what I'm hearing in a nutshell: Major parts of the design pattern Common, fairly static and prominently useful code (reference or specs) Some representation of data useful in collaborating or sharing with team Extreme cases of tough problem solving Overwhelmingly,almost never print anything.

  Read the article

• andengine - how to make the game wait for an animation to finish?

  - by petervaz

  I'm teaching myself andengine while trying to make a match-3 puzzle, so far I have a grid of gems that I populate and can move then around. Matching gems and new gems falling is working already. My problem is that the game keeps flowing while animations runs. How can I make the flow suspend until movement is done? I use entity modifiers for the gems animations. MoveYModifier for the fall and PathModifier for the swap.

  Read the article

• Celko's SQL Stumper: Eggs in one Basket

  Joe Celko returns with another stumper to celebrate Easter. Unsurprisingly, this involves eggs. More surprising is the nature of the puzzle: This time, the puzzle is one of designing a database rather than a query. DDL as well as the DML.

  Read the article

• How does a "Variables introduce state"?

  - by kunj2aan

  I was reading the "C++ Coding Standards" and this line was there: Variables introduce state, and you should have to deal with as little state as possible, with lifetimes as short as possible. Doesn't anything that mutates eventually manipulate state? What does "you should have to deal with little state as possible" mean? In an impure language such as C++, isn't state management really what you are doing? And what are other ways to "deal with as little state as possible" other than limiting variable lifetime?

  Read the article

• How necessary is it to learn JavaScript before jQuery?

  - by benhowdle89

  In my opinion, when I looked at JavaScript, it looked like not my cup of tea. When I came across jQuery, I loved it. I sat and watched Nettuts+ 15 days of jQuery screencasts, 1 year later and now I'm fairly confident I wouldn't develop a website without including jQuery's library. I have never felt this has held me back but my question is, will this come back and bite me in the ass one day, the fact that I didn't have a solid JavaScript foundation before jumping feet first into one of its best (if not the best) frameworks? Did anyone else take this approach?

  Read the article

• Refactor or Concentrate on Completing App

  - by Jiew Meng

  Would you refactor your app as you go or focus on completing app first? Refactoring will mean progress of app app will slow down. Completing app will mean you get a possibly very hard to maintain app later on? The app is a personal project. I don't really know how to answer "What drives the functionality and design", but I guess it's to solve inefficiencies in current software out there. I like minimal easy to use software too. So I am removing some features and add some that I feel will help.

  Read the article

• Language Niches and Niche Libraries

  - by Roman A. Taycher

  "Everyone Knows" ... ... that c is widely used for low level programs in large part because operating system/device apis are usually in c. ... that Java is widely used for enterprise applications in large part because of enterprise libraries and ide support. ... that ruby is widely used for webapps thanks in large part because of rails and its library ecosytem But lets go into to details what are the specific niches and subniches. Especially with respect to libraries. Where might you embed lua for application scripting versus python. Where would you use Java vs C#. Which languages do different scientists use? Also which languages have libraries for these subniches? Things like bioperl/scipy/Incanter. Please no flamewars about how nice each language or environment is. This is where they used. Also no complaints about marketing/PHBs. (Manually migrated) I asked this question again after it was closed on stackoverflow.com

  Read the article

• Is there a Source Insight alternative?

  - by hansioux

  I am not a developer, but for my work I trace a lot of codes. It is actually rather difficult reading other people's code, especially for bigger projects. Source Insight is a great application that stores all the symbols in a data base, so you can see a new function being called, click on it and see how the function is written. You can see all the referrer of a object or jump to a caller. You don't need to break the train of thought and think up shell commands just to find these things every time you ran into a new variable/structure/function from some other files. I have it running on WINE, but there are little glitches that sometimes gets in the way. I know people will mention C-scope, I've tried it, but it really isn't the same. So, with so many huge open source projects out there for Ubuntu, are there native tools to help read them efficiently? EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions, but does CODE::BLOCKS or CodeLite provide abilities to see the function that the mouse clicked on without jumping to it, so I can see the caller and callee at the same time?

  Read the article

• How is intermediate data organized in MapReduce?

  - by Pedro Cattori

  From what I understand, each mapper outputs an intermediate file. The intermediate data (data contained in each intermediate file) is then sorted by key. Then, a reducer is assigned a key by the master. The reducer reads from the intermediate file containing the key and then calls reduce using the data it has read. But in detail, how is the intermediate data organized? Can a data corresponding to a key be held in multiple intermediate files? What happens when there is too much data corresponding to one key to be held by a single file? In short, how do intermediate partitions differ from intermediate files and how are these differences dealt with in the implementation?

  Read the article

• How to shift development culture from tech fetish to focusing on simplicity and getting things done?

  - by Serge

  Looking for ways to switch team/individual culture from chasing latest fads, patterns, and all kinds of best practices to focusing on finding quickest and simplest solutions and shipping features. My definition of "tech fetish": Chasing latest fads, applying new technologies and best practices without considering product/project impact, focusing on micro optimization, creating platforms and frameworks instead of finding simple and quick ways to ship product features. Few examples of culture differences: From "Spent a day on trying to map database query with five complex joins in NHibernate" to "Wrote a SQL query and used DataReader to pull data in" From "Wrote super-fast JSON parser in C++" to "Used Python to parse JSON response and call C++ code" From "Let's use WCF because it supports all possible communication standards" to "REST is simple text-based format, let's stick with it and use simple HTTP handlers"

  Read the article

• What are approaches for analyzing the cost-benefits of a development methodology?

  - by Garrett Hall

  There are many development practices (TDD, continuous integration, cowboy-coding), principles (SOLID, layers of abstraction, KISS), and processes (RUP, Scrum, XP, Waterfall). I have learned you can't follow any of these blindly, but have to consider context and ROI (return on investment). My question is: How do you know whether you are getting a good ROI by following a particular methodology? Metrics, guesstimation, experience? Do analytical methods exist? Or is this just the million-dollar question in software engineering that has no answer?

  Read the article

• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

  Read the article

• design a model for a system of dependent variables

  - by dbaseman

  I'm dealing with a modeling system (financial) that has dozens of variables. Some of the variables are independent, and function as inputs to the system; most of them are calculated from other variables (independent and calculated) in the system. What I'm looking for is a clean, elegant way to: define the function of each dependent variable in the system trigger a re-calculation, whenever a variable changes, of the variables that depend on it A naive way to do this would be to write a single class that implements INotifyPropertyChanged, and uses a massive case statement that lists out all the variable names x1, x2, ... xn on which others depend, and, whenever a variable xi changes, triggers a recalculation of each of that variable's dependencies. I feel that this naive approach is flawed, and that there must be a cleaner way. I started down the path of defining a CalculationManager<TModel> class, which would be used (in a simple example) something like as follows: public class Model : INotifyPropertyChanged { private CalculationManager<Model> _calculationManager = new CalculationManager<Model>(); // each setter triggers a "PropertyChanged" event public double? Height { get; set; } public double? Weight { get; set; } public double? BMI { get; set; } public Model() { _calculationManager.DefineDependency<double?>( forProperty: model => model.BMI, usingCalculation: (height, weight) => weight / Math.Pow(height, 2), withInputs: model => model.Height, model.Weight); } // INotifyPropertyChanged implementation here } I won't reproduce CalculationManager<TModel> here, but the basic idea is that it sets up a dependency map, listens for PropertyChanged events, and updates dependent properties as needed. I still feel that I'm missing something major here, and that this isn't the right approach: the (mis)use of INotifyPropertyChanged seems to me like a code smell the withInputs parameter is defined as params Expression<Func<TModel, T>>[] args, which means that the argument list of usingCalculation is not checked at compile time the argument list (weight, height) is redundantly defined in both usingCalculation and withInputs I am sure that this kind of system of dependent variables must be common in computational mathematics, physics, finance, and other fields. Does someone know of an established set of ideas that deal with what I'm grasping at here? Would this be a suitable application for a functional language like F#? Edit More context: The model currently exists in an Excel spreadsheet, and is being migrated to a C# application. It is run on-demand, and the variables can be modified by the user from the application's UI. Its purpose is to retrieve variables that the business is interested in, given current inputs from the markets, and model parameters set by the business.

  Read the article

• Compilable modern alternatives to C/C++

  - by Jeremy French

  I am considering writing a new software product. Performance will be critical, so I am wary of using an interpreted or language or one that uses a emulation layer (read java). Which leads me to thinking of using C (or C++) however these are both rather long in the tooth. I haven't used either for a long time. I figure in the last 20 years someone should have created something which is reasonably popular and is nice to code in and is complied. What more modern alternatives are there to C for writing high performance code compiled code? edit in response to comments If C++ is a different beast than it was 15 years ago, I would consider it, I guess I had an assumption that it had some inherent problems. Parallelisation would be important, but probably not across multiple machines.

  Read the article

• Should a project start with the client or the server?

  - by MadBurn

  Pretty simple question with a complex answer. Should a project start with the client or the server, and why? Where should a single programmer start a client/server project? What are the best practices and what are the reasons behind them? If you can't think of any, what reasons do you use to justify why you would choose to start one before the other? Personally, I'm asking this question because I'm finishing up specs for a project I will be doing for myself on the side for fun. But now that I'm finishing this phase, I'm wondering "ok, now where do I begin?" Since I've never done a project like this by myself, I'm not sure where I should start. In this project, my server will be doing all the heavy lifting and the client will just be sending updates, getting information from the server, and displaying it. But, I don't want that to sway the answer as I'm looking for more of an in depth and less specific answer that would apply to any project I begin in the future.

  Read the article

• Is that true that .Net will be dumped by Microsoft in Windows 8? [closed]

  - by Dee Jay

  Possible Duplicate: What does Windows 8 mean for the future of .NET? Ok, I read this question and someone pointed that C# will be sidelined in next version of windows. There is a link in that question pointed at another link, i.e. this one: Dumping .NET - Microsoft's Madness Is that true that .Net will be dumped by Microsoft in Windows 8? Someone with insider information please share with us your opinions. I'm deeply worried about this.

  Read the article

• Push-Based Events in a Services Oriented Architecture

  - by Colin Morelli

  I have come to a point, in building a services oriented architecture (on top of Thrift), that I need to expose events and allow listeners. My initial thought was, "create an EventService" to handle publishing and subscribing to events. That EventService can use whatever implementation it desires to actually distribute the events. My client automatically round-robins service requests to available service hosts which are determined using Zookeeper-based service discovery. So, I'd probably use JMS inside of EventService mainly for the purpose of persisting messages (in the event that a service host for EventService goes down before it can distribute the message to all of the available listeners). When I started considering this, I began looking into the differences between Queues and Topics. Topics unfortunately won't work for me, because (at least for now), all listeners must receive the message (even if they were down at the time the event was pushed, or hadn't made a subscription yet because they haven't completed startup (during deployment, for example) - messages should be queued until the service is available). However, I don't want EventService to be responsible for handling all of the events. I don't think it should have the code to react to events inside of it. Each of the services should do what it needs with a given event. This would indicate that each service would need a JMS connection, which questions the value of having EventService at all (as the services could individually publish and subscribe to JMS directly). However, it also couples all of the services to JMS (when I'd rather that there be a single service that's responsible for determining how to distribute events). What I had thought was to publish an event to EventService, which pulls a configuration of listeners from some configuration source (database, flat file, irrelevant for now). It replicates the message and pushes each one back into a queue with information specific to that listener (so, if there are 3 listeners, 1 event would become 3 events in JMS). Then, another thread in EventService (which is replicated, running on multiple hots) would be pulling from the queue, attempting to make the service call to the "listener", and returning the message to the queue (if the service is down), or discarding the message (if the listener completed successfully). tl;dr If I have an EventService that is responsible for receiving events and delegating service calls to "event listeners," (which are really just endpoints on other services), how should it know how to craft the service call? Should I create a generic "Event" object that is shared among all services? Then, the EventService can just construct this object and pass it to the service call. Or is there a better answer to this problem entirely?

  Read the article

• Which is preferable? To know jQuery well, or to know JavaScript well? [closed]

  - by Marwan

  I'm quite familiar with using jQuery, but I've come to feel like a bit of a dummy using it, as my knowledge of JavaScript itself is rather poor. So I'm considering abandoning jQuery and spending time working in straight JS... perhaps even creating my own framework as a learning experience. Does this make sense though? Is there any real point to obtaining more than a passing knowledge of JavaScript when jQuery allows me to accomplish so much, so quickly?

  Read the article

• Are there currently any modern, standardized, aptitude test for software engineering?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  Background I am a working software engineer who is in the midst of seeking out a new contract for the next year or so. In my search, I am enduring several absurd technical interviews as indicated by this popular question I asked earlier today. Even if the questions I was being asked weren't almost always absurd, I would be tired nonetheless of answering them many times over for various contract opportunities. So this got me thinking that having a standardized exam that working software professionals could take would provide a common scorecard that could be referenced by interviewers in lieu of absurd technical interview questions (i.e. nerd hazing). Question Is there a standardized software engineering aptitude test (SEAT??) available for working professionals to take? If there isn't a such an exam out there, what questions or topics should be covered? An additional thought Please keep in mind, if suggesting a question or topic, to focus on questions or topics that would be relevant to contemporary development practices and realistic needs in the workforce as that would be the point of a standard aptitude test. In other words, no clown traversal questions.

  Read the article

• How much time takes to a new language like D to become popular? [closed]

  - by Adrián Pérez

  I was reading about new languages for me to learn and I find very good comments about D, like it's the new C or what C++ should have been. Knowing that many people say wonders about the language, I'm wondering how much time usually takes to a language to become popular. This is, having libraries ported or written natively for this language and being used in serious software development. I have read about the history of Java, and Python to figure it out, but may be they are too high level complexity to say their development could take the same time as will take for D.

  Read the article

• Refactoring and Open / Closed principle

  - by Giorgio

  I have recently being reading a web site about clean code development (I do not put a link here because it is not in English). One of the principles advertised by this site is the Open Closed Principle: each software component should be open for extension and closed for modification. E.g., when we have implemented and tested a class, we should only modify it to fix bugs or to add new functionality (e.g. new methods that do not influence the existing ones). The existing functionality and implementation should not be changed. I normally apply this principle by defining an interface I and a corresponding implementation class A. When class A has become stable (implemented and tested), I normally do not modify it too much (possibly, not at all), i.e. If new requirements arrive (e.g. performance, or a totally new implementation of the interface) that require big changes to the code, I write a new implementation B, and keep using A as long as B is not mature. When B is mature, all that is needed is to change how I is instantiated. If the new requirements suggest a change to the interface as well, I define a new interface I' and a new implementation A'. So I, A are frozen and remain the implementation for the production system as long as I' and A' are not stable enough to replace them. So, in view of these observation, I was a bit surprised that the web page then suggested the use of complex refactorings, "... because it is not possible to write code directly in its final form." Isn't there a contradiction / conflict between enforcing the Open / Closed Principle and suggesting the use of complex refactorings as a best practice? Or the idea here is that one can use complex refactorings during the development of a class A, but when that class has been tested successfully it should be frozen?

  Read the article

• How do I print values of an array in Three Rows?

  - by Ramkumar

  I need this output.. 1 3 5 2 4 6 I want to use array function like array(1,2,3,4,5,6). If I edit this array like array(1,2,3), it means the output need to show like 1 2 3 The concept is maximum 3 column only. If we give array(1,2,3,4,5), it means the output should be 1 3 5 2 4 Suppose we will give array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), then it means output is 1 4 7 2 5 8 3 6 9 that is, maximum 3 column only. Depends upon the the given input, the rows will be created with 3 columns. Is this possible with PHP? I am doing small Research & Development in array functions. I think this is possible. Will you help me? For more info: * input: array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) * output: 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15

  Read the article

• Why do memory-managed languages retain the `new` keyword?

  - by Channel72

  The new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# creates a new instance of a class. This syntax seems to have been inherited from C++, where new is used specifically to allocate a new instance of a class on the heap, and return a pointer to the new instance. In C++, this is not the only way to construct an object. You can also construct an object on the stack, without using new - and in fact, this way of constructing objects is much more common in C++. So, coming from a C++ background, the new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# seemed natural and obvious to me. Then I started to learn Python, which doesn't have the new keyword. In Python, an instance is constructed simply by calling the constructor, like: f = Foo() At first, this seemed a bit off to me, until it occurred to me that there's no reason for Python to have new, because everything is an object so there's no need to disambiguate between various constructor syntaxes. But then I thought - what's really the point of new in Java? Why should we say Object o = new Object();? Why not just Object o = Object();? In C++ there's definitely a need for new, since we need to distinguish between allocating on the heap and allocating on the stack, but in Java all objects are constructed on the heap, so why even have the new keyword? The same question could be asked for Javascript. In C#, which I'm much less familiar with, I think new may have some purpose in terms of distinguishing between object types and value types, but I'm not sure. Regardless, it seems to me that many languages which came after C++ simply "inherited" the new keyword - without really needing it. It's almost like a vestigial keyword. We don't seem to need it for any reason, and yet it's there. Question: Am I correct about this? Or is there some compelling reason that new needs to be in C++-inspired memory-managed languages like Java, Javascript and C#?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173  | Next Page >