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  • Returning null vs Throwing exceptions

    - by Svish
    Is in a bit of disagreement with a more experienced developer on this issue, and was wondering what you guys here think about this. Environment is Java, EJB 3, services, etc. The code I wrote calls a service to get things and to create things. Problem was that I got null pointer exceptions in places that didn't make sense. For example when I asked the service to create an object, I got null back. And when I tried to look up an object with an id I knew existed, I still got null back. Was like it was ignoring me. Spent some time trying to figure out what was wrong in my code (since I'm less experienced I usually assume I have messed up). Turns out the reason was security. If the user principal using my service didn't have the right permissions to use the service I called from my service, then that service simply returned null. The services that are here already are usually not documented either, so this is just something you have to know... somehow... So here is the thing: I mean that this is rather confusing as a developer interacting with this service. To me it would make much more sense if that service thew an exception which would tell me that hey, you don't have the proper permissions to get info about this thing or to create this new thing. I would then immediately know why my service wasn't working as expected. However, he argued that asking is not wrong. Exceptions should only be thrown when there is an error and asking for a thing is not an error. Even if you don't have permission to "see" that the thing you asked for. The things are often looked up in a GUI by users and for those users not having the right permissions, these things simply "do not exist". So, in short: Asking is not wrong, hence no exception. Get methods return null because to those users those things "doesn't exist". Create methods return null because nothing was created, since the user wasn't allowed to create anything. So, what do you guys think? Is this normal and/or good practice? I prefer exceptions as I prefer throwing and catching exceptions because I find it much easier to know what's going on. So I would for example also prefer to throw a NotFoundException if you asked for an id which didn't exist, rather than returning null. Anyways, just curious to what others think about this as I'm not the most experienced developer yet.

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  • Backward compatibility with event-sourcing

    - by Tomas Jansson
    How do you stay backward compatible with event-sourcing? Let say you release a version that has one kind of event, let call it X. You know how to handle that event in all the systems that extracts the events from the event source. In a later release you make a change to event X or delete it, how do you stay backward compatible with that? To have a fully functional system you need to be able to handle the old event as the same time as you need to handle the updated version. Or if you delete that event type, then you will be stuck with code that is only there to handle legacy events which in my head can be a little bit messy in the long run.

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  • complex access control system

    - by Atul Gupta
    I want to build a complex access control system just like Facebook. How should I design my database so that: A user may select which streams to see (via liking a page) and may further select to see all or only important streams. Also he get to see posts of a friend, but if a friend changes visibility he may or may not see it. A user may be an owner or member of a group and accordingly he have access. So for a user there is so many access related information and also for each data point. I use Perl/MySQL/Apache. Any help will be appreciated.

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  • Best option for PDF viewer embedded in web app

    - by RationalGeek
    I have a web app that needs to be able to display a PDF. It needs to allow the user to page through the PDF, and my application needs to be able to know which page is currently being viewed, because other aspects of the web app will change based on the current page. Ideally it would not be dependent on the client having Adobe Reader but I could probably support that dependency. What are my best options for this? My application stack consists of ASP.NET 4 along with optionally Silverlight 5. Also, I could use something that is client-side based as well using JavaScript / HTML if such a thing exists. I found ComponentOne's offering for this and that seems like the leading candidate at this point, but I want to know if there are other options I should consider. Edit: Per Fosco's comment, converting the PDF to another format (such as HTML) might be an option, as long as I could tie back parts of the converted document to the original PDF page #s. Another note: this has to run entirely on our servers. It would not be acceptable to use a third-party service to view the PDFs.

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  • Terminology: .NET C++ vs. traditional C++

    - by Mike Clark
    Hello. I've recently been working with a team that's using both .NET C++ and pre-.NET C++. I fully understand the technical differences between the two technologies. However, I sometimes feel like I'm floundering when it comes to the terminology used to differentiate the two. Example: Say we have two projects: ProjectA contains "C++" code that builds a .NET assembly DLL. ProjectB contains Visual C++ code that builds a traditional native Windows DLL. What is the best way to succinctly and terminologically draw a distinction between the two projects? Again, I'm not asking for an in-depth technical description of the differences between the two technologies. I'm just looking for names and labels. This is how I might try to make the distinction when talking to someone about Project A and Project B: "ProjectA is a managed .NET C++ project" and ProjectB is an unmanaged Visual C++ DLL project." However I am not at all certain that this terminology is ideal, or even correct. Please describe what you feel the ideal language to use in this situation (or similar situations) might be. Feel free to motivate your answer.

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  • Which design better when use foreign key instead of a string to store a list of id

    - by Kien Thanh
    I'm building online examination system. I have designed to table, Question and GeneralExam. The table GeneralExam contains info about the exam like name, description, duration,... Now I would like to design table GeneralQuestion, it will contain the ids of questions belongs to a general exam. Currently, I have two ideas to design GeneralQuestion table: It will have two columns: general_exam_id, question_id. It will have two columns: general_exam_id, list_question_ids (string/text). I would like to know which designing is better, or pros and cons of each designing. I'm using Postgresql database.

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  • Design Anti-Patterns - C# - Do you call this a God object?

    - by Reddy S R
    I am writing Portfolio module for my web site and it has 3 components. Gallery Category, Gallery, & Gallery Images. I am doing all the request handling, (creating, reading, updating, other), for the above 3 components in 1 class, Portfolio. DB handling jobs for Portfolio module is done in another file. My question is, even just for request handling purpose, can you do all the operations in 1 class? -Reddy

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  • Learning Asynchronous programming

    - by xenoterracide
    Asynchronous non-blocking event driven programming seems to be all the rage. I have a basic conceptual understanding of what this all means. However what I'm not sure is when and where my code can benefit from being asynchronous, or how to make blocking IO, non-blocking. I'm sure that I can simply use a library to do this, but I'm more interested in more in depth concepts, and the various ways to implement it myself. Are there any comprehensive/definitive books, or other resources on this subject (like GoF for Design Patterns, or K&R for C, tldp for things like bash)? (Note: I'm not sure if this is actually functionally an identical question to my question on Learning event driven programming)

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  • Non-zero exit status for clean exit

    - by trinithis
    Is it acceptable to return a non-zero exit code if the program in question ran properly? For example, say I have a simple program that (only) does the following: Program takes N arguments. It returns an exit code of min(N, 255). Note that any N is valid for the program. A more realistic program might return different codes for successfully ran programs that signify different things. Should these programs instead write this information to a stream instead, such as to stdout?

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  • Is WCF suitable for writing an application which is shared among applications?

    - by RPK
    I have developed and deployed few ASP.NET applications. Sometimes I want to stop the users from either inserting or updating a record when: Maintenance is going on. Stop operations due to payment delay. In one of my recent application I have implemented this feature to first check the database operations for locked status. If any of the above condition fulfils, database operations like insert and update are not carried out. I now need this feature in all the old applications and the future applications I build. I want to know whether WCF is suitable in this scenario as I want to share methods or an independent locking application among various other applications. Is WCF appropriate for this type of scenario?

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  • Is code that terminates on a random condition guaranteed to terminate?

    - by Simon Campbell
    If I had a code which terminated based on if a random number generator returned a result (as follows), would it be 100% certain that the code would terminate if it was allowed to run forever. while (random(MAX_NUMBER) != 0): // random returns a random number between 0 and MAX_NUMBER print('Hello World') I am also interested in any distinctions between purely random and the deterministic random that computers generally use. Assume the seed is not able to be known in the case of the deterministic random. Naively it could be suggested that the code will exit, after all every number has some possibility and all of time for that possibility to be exercised. On the other hand it could be argued that there is the random chance it may not ever meet the exit condition-- the generator could generate 1 'randomly' until infinity. (I suppose one would question the validity of the random number generator if it was a deterministic generator returning only 1's 'randomly' though)

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  • Why Beta versions have so many bugs?

    - by Eugene
    When I worked in Microsoft on MSE antivirus, we had several stages of pre-release: Alpha, Beta, RC. The biggest difference between these stages were bug fixes. Each time we fixed more bugs, and usually updated some minor features. Apple works in the same way. Look here: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-installer-for-os-x-yosemite/ They released a beta of Yosemite OS, but the beta is full of bugs. Why do these big companies work like this? Isn't it better to release a beta version that was tested very thoroughly but one that just doesn't provide all the features that the final version will provide?

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  • Is it my responsibility to code for errors on a completely separate website and domain when redirecting or doing a single sign on?

    - by kappasims
    If my application is responsible for redirecting/doing a single sign on to a destination managed by a third party, in general, where should I draw the line for error handling during this process? If an error happens on the other application's end, is it reasonable for my stakeholder to expect the application I am working with to share responsibility for handling these scenarios? Notes: I am going to keep solutions limited to those that entail only one request--I am familiar with the "do an xmlhttprequest and see how that fares before doing anything else" approach. I am speaking in terms of an enterprise-level application with fairly decent customer traffic.

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  • Programming and Ubiquitous Language (DDD) in a non-English domain

    - by Sandor Drieënhuizen
    I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubiquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally used across developers and domain experts to avoid inconsistencies and miscommunication due to translation problems and misunderstanding. You will see the same terminology show up in code, conversations between any team member, functional specs and whatnot. So, what I was wondering about is how to deal with Ubiquitous Language in non-English domains. Personally, I strongly favor writing programming code in English completely, including comments but ofcourse excluding constants and resources. However, in a non-English domain, I'm forced to make a decision either to: Write code reflecting the Ubiquitous Language in the natural language of the domain. Translate the Ubiquitous Language to English and stop communicating in the natural language of the domain. Define a table that defines how the Ubiquitous Language translates to English. Here are some of my thoughts based on these options: 1) I have a strong aversion against mixed-language code, that is coding using type/member/variable names etc. that are non-English. Most programming languages 'breathe' English to a large extent and most of the technical literature, design pattern names etc. are in English as well. Therefore, in most cases there's just no way of writing code entirely in a non-English language so you end up with mixed languages anyway. 2) This will force the domain experts to start thinking and talking in the English equivalent of the UL, something that will probably not come naturally to them and therefore hinders communication significantly. 3) In this case, the developers communicate with the domain experts in their native language while the developers communicate with each other in English and most importantly, they write code using the English translation of the UL. I'm sure I don't want to go for the first option and I think option 3 is much better than option 2. What do you think? Am I missing other options? UPDATE Today, about year later, having dealt with this issue on a daily basis, I have to say that option 3 has worked out pretty well for me. It wasn't as tedious as I initially feared and translating in real time while talking to the client wasn't a problem either. I also found the following advantages to be true, based on my experience. Translating the UL makes you pay more attention to defining the UL and even the domain itself, especially when you don't know how to translate a term and you have to start looking through dictionaries etc. This has even caused me to reconsider domain modeling decisions a few times. It helps you make your knowledge of the English language more profound. Obviously, your code is much more pleasant to look at instead of being a mind boggling obscenity.

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  • Is a Model Driven Architecture in Language Oriented Programming (MPS) feasible at this time

    - by Steven Jeuris
    As a side project I am developing some sort of DSL where I describe a data model, and generate desired code files from it. I believe this is called Model Driven Architecture. My partial existing implementation uses C#, CodeDOM, XML and XSLT to do this manually. I discovered there already exist better environments to do this in. The one which fascinated me the most is called MPS, which follows the Language Oriented Programming paradigm. This article, written by a cofounder of JetBrains was a real eye opener for me. I truly believe LOP has a very good chance of becoming the next big programming paradigm once it has broader support. From my short experience with MPS, I noticed it is still mainly Java-oriented. My question is, how feasible is it to generate code files for other (multiple) languages instead of just Java. I don't need full language support from the start, so preferably, I need to be able to implement a language in a agile way. E.g. first support only one type, add access modifiers, ... Perhaps some other (free) environment already provides this out of the box. P.S.: I find it important to have a lot of control over the naming conventions and such of the generated code. This is one of the reasons why I started my own implementation.

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  • Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

    - by Andrew M
    I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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  • Interviewing a DBA

    - by kev
    Our Company is in the Process of recuiting a DBA. I have built a group test of questions from basic questions such as Pk and Fk constraints, simple querries(fizzbuzz style) to more advanced things such as indexes, Collation, isolation levels and how to trace deadlocks. However, that is the limit of my knowledge. So my question to all the DBA's is what is the base level knowledge that all DBA's should have? We are really looking for someone that will be able to manage our replication, analyzing some of our slower running queries(that the devs can go to for help) and someone that can trace some of the deadlock issues that we are having. Any help would be most appreciated!

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  • asp.net mvc vs angular.js model binding

    - by aw04
    So I've noticed a trend lately of .net web developers using angular.js on the client side of applications and I've become more curious as I play around with angular and compare it to how I would do things in asp.net mvc. I'll give a quick example of what really got me thinking. I recently came across a situation at work (I work in a .net environment) where I needed to create a table bound to a collection of objects that had the ability to add and remove rows/items from the collection. I had an add button that created a new object and appended a row to the end of the table, and a remove button in each row to remove a particular object/row. Using asp.net mvc, I first found myself making an ajax call to the server for each operation, updating the server side model, and refreshing part of the page to show the result in the table. This worked but I didn't really like the idea of calling the server to update the model each time, so I tried to come up with a solution to do this on the client side. It turned out to be quite a task, as I had to generate the html on add with validation and all and the correct indexing for the model binding to work. It got worse on remove, as I ended up with a crazy string replace function to recreate the indexes on each item to satisfy the binding requirements (if an item other than the last is removed, the indexes are no longer correct). Now out of curiosity, I tried to recreate this at home in angular (which I had no experience with) and it took me all of about 10 minutes with simple functions to add and remove items from the client side model. This is just one example, but it seems to me that I'm able to achieve the same results with far fewer calls to the server in angular because of the fact that it binds to a client side model. So my question is, is this a distinct advantage of using a javascript mvc framework or am I somehow under utilizing the power of asp.net mvc and am I right in thinking that these operations should be done on the client and have no business requiring calls to the server?

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  • Is it ok to replace optimized code with readable code?

    - by Coder
    Sometimes you run into a situation where you have to extend/improve an existing code. You see that the old code is very lean, but it's also difficult to extend, and takes time to read. Is it a good idea to replace it with modern code? Some time ago I liked the lean approach, but now, it seems to me that it's better to sacrifice a lot of optimizations in favor of higher abstractions, better interfaces and more readable, extendable code. The compilers seem to be getting better as well, so things like struct abc = {} are silently turned into memsets, shared_ptrs are pretty much producing the same code as raw pointer twiddling, templates are working super good because they produce super lean code, and so on. But still, sometimes you see stack based arrays and old C functions with some obscure logic, and usually they are not on the critical path. Is it good idea to change such code if you have to touch a small piece of it either way?

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  • Why PHP Function Naming so Inconsistent?

    - by Shamim Hafiz
    I was going through some PHP functions and I could not help notice the following: <?php function foo(&$var) { } foo($a); // $a is "created" and assigned to null $b = array(); foo($b['b']); var_dump(array_key_exists('b', $b)); // bool(true) $c = new StdClass; foo($c->d); var_dump(property_exists($c, 'd')); // bool(true) ?> Notice the array_key_exists() and property_exists() function. In the first one, the property name(key for an array) is the first parameter while in the second one it is the second parameter. By intuition, one would expect them to have similar signature. This can lead to confusion and the development time may be wasted by making corrections of this type. Shouldn't PHP, or any language for that matter, consider making the signatures of related functions consistent?

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  • Gathering all data in single iteration vs using functions for readable code

    - by user828584
    Say I have an array of runners with which I need to find the tallest runner, the fastest runner, and the lightest runner. It seems like the most readable solution would be: runners = getRunners(); tallestRunner = getTallestRunner(runners); fastestRunner = getFastestRunner(runners); lightestRunner = getLightestRunner(runners); ..where each function iterates over the runners and keeps track of the largest height, greatest speed, and lowest weight. Iterating over the array three times, however, doesn't seem like a very good idea. It would instead be better to do: int greatestHeght, greatestSpeed, leastWeight; Runner tallestRunner, fastestRunner, lightestRunner; for(runner in runners){ if(runner.height > greatestHeight) { greatestHeight = runner.height; tallestRunner = runner; } if(runner.speed > ... } While this isn't too unreadable, it can get messy when there is more logic for each piece of information being extracted in the iteration. What's the middle ground here? How can I use only a single iteration while still keeping the code divided into logical units?

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  • What are tangible advantages to proper Unit Tests over Functional Test called unit tests

    - by Jackie
    A project I am working on has a bunch of legacy tests that were not properly mocked out. Because of this the only dependency it has is EasyMock, which doesn't support statics, constructors with arguments, etc. The tests instead rely on database connections and such to "run" the tests. Adding powermock to handle these cases is being shot down as cost prohibitive due to the need to upgrade the existing project to support it (Another discussion). My questions are, what are the REAL world tangible benifits of proper unit testing I can use to push back? Are there any? Am I just being a stickler by saying that bad unit tests (even if they work) are bad? Is code coverage just as effective?

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  • Given the presentation model pattern, is the view, presentation model, or model responsible for adding child views to an existing view at runtime?

    - by Ryan Taylor
    I am building a Flex 4 based application using the presentation model design pattern. This application will have several different components to it as shown in the image below. The MainView and DashboardView will always be visible and they each have corresponding presentation models and models as necessary. These views are easily created by declaring their MXML in the application root. <s:HGroup width="100%" height="100%"> <MainView width="75% height="100%"/> <DashboardView width="25%" height="100%"/> </s:HGroup> There will also be many WidgetViewN views that can be added to the DashboardView by the user at runtime through a simple drop down list. This will need to be accomplished via ActionScript. The drop down list should always show what WidgetViewN has already been added to the DashboardView. Therefore some state about which WidgetViewN's have been created needs to be stored. Since the list of available WidgetViewN and which ones are added to the DashboardView also need to be accessible from other components in the system I think this needs to be stored in a Model object. My understanding of the presentation model design pattern is that the view is very lean. It contains as close to zero logic as is practical. The view communicates/binds to the presentation model which contains all the necessary view logic. The presentation model is effectively an abstract representation of the view which supports low coupling and eases testability. The presentation model may have one or more models injected in in order to display the necessary information. The models themselves contain no view logic whatsoever. So I have a several questions around this design. Who should be responsible for creating the WidgetViewN components and adding these to the DashboardView? Is this the responsibility of the DashboardView, DashboardPresentationModel, DashboardModel or something else entirely? It seems like the DashboardPresentationModel would be responsible for creating/adding/removing any child views from it's display but how do you do this without passing in the DashboardView to the DashboardPresentationModel? The list of available and visible WidgetViewN components needs to be accessible to a few other components as well. Is it okay for a reference to a WidgetViewN to be stored/referenced in a model? Are there any good examples of the presentation model pattern online in Flex that also include creating child views at runtime?

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  • How should I pitch moving to an agile/iterative development cycle with mandated 3-week deployments?

    - by Wayne M
    I'm part of a small team of four, and I'm the unofficial team lead (I'm lead in all but title, basically). We've largely been a "cowboy" environment, with no architecture or structure and everyone doing their own thing. Previously, our production deployments would be every few months without being on a set schedule, as things were added/removed to the task list of each developer. Recently, our CIO (semi-technical but not really a programmer) decided we will do deployments every three weeks; because of this I instantly thought that adopting an iterative development process (not necessarily full-blown Agile/XP, which would be a huge thing to convince everyone else to do) would go a long way towards helping manage expectations properly so there isn't this far-fetched idea that any new feature will be done in three weeks. IMO the biggest hurdle is that we don't have ANY kind of development approach in place right now (among other things like no CI or automated tests whatsoever). We don't even use Waterfall, we use "Tell Developer X to do a task, expect him to do everything and get it done". Are there any pointers that would help me start to ease us towards an iterative approach and A) Get the other developers on board with it and B) Get management to understand how iterative works? So far my idea involves trying to set up a CI server and get our build process automated (it takes about 10-20 minutes right now to simply build the application to put it on our development server), since pushing tests and/or TDD will be met with a LOT of resistance at this point, and constantly force us to break larger projects into smaller chunks that could be done iteratively in a three-week cycle; my only concern is that, unless I'm misunderstanding, an agile/iterative process may or may not release the software (depending on the project scope you might have "working" software after three weeks, but there isn't enough of it that works to let users make use of it), while I think the expectation here from management is that there will always be something "ready to go" in three weeks, and that disconnect could cause problems. On that note, is there any literature or references that explains the agile/iterative approach from a business standpoint? Everything I've seen only focuses on the developers, how to do it, but nothing seems to describe it from the perspective of actually getting the buy-in from the businesspeople.

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  • Why should i write a commit message?

    - by acidzombie24
    Why should i write a commit message? I dont want to and i think its stupid every single time. A gui frontend i use which will go unnamed forces you to do it. I hear other doing it everytime even if they are using the VCS on the command line. If i commit several times a day and havent finish a feature what am i writing about? I ONLY ever write a message after many comments and i feel its time for a mini tag or when i do an actual tag. Am i right or am i missing something? also i am using a distributed system

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