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• Why should a class be anything other than "abstract" or "final/sealed"

  - by Nicolas Repiquet

  After 10+ years of java/c# programming, I find myself creating either: abstract classes: contract not meant to be instantiated as-is. final/sealed classes: implementation not meant to serve as base class to something else. I can't think of any situation where a simple "class" (i.e. neither abstract nor final/sealed) would be "wise programming". Why should a class be anything other than "abstract" or "final/sealed" ? EDIT This great article explains my concerns far better than I can.

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• What if you've been asked to develop a site and the client later introduces Ts&Cs that you'll breach whilst doing your job?

  - by Matt Lacey

  Disclaimer : this is all made up. Honest. And it represents no clients or employers living or dead, blah blah blah, etc. [Allegedly] As part of a website I've built, I've now been provided the Terms and Conditions of site usage to display on the site. These terms--which must be agreed to to access the site--include my (or any visitor to the sites) compliance with a number of clauses. Many of these clauses refer to general computer use and are not tied specifically to use of the site. Some of these clauses refer to things I have had to previously do as a legitimate part of my job and would expect to have to do again. When I've raised similar issues previously my line manager has said just to ignore it but that doesn't seem to be the professional thing to do. So, what do I do? Abiding by the terms would mean that I could no longer work on the project and would cause issues with my employer and the owner of the business the site is being created for. Ignoring them could lead to possible future issues with the business owner and is not something I'm necessarily happy with (the deliberate breaking of a legal contract). Neither option is one I'd choose and could have major consequences. Any thoughts?

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• Office arangement - comfort vs. teamwork?

  - by finrod

  Our team works in an open-space office. Luckily the cubicles are quite big (L shaped tables for everyone!), there is quite a lot of space so we are not sandwiched. Without going into further detail, there are comfortable spots (window), normal spots and stupid spots (near the corridor). Until recently, the development team of twelve engineers was seated so that all types of spots were occupied and we were all close together. In the old arrangement, verbal communication was very easy - half of the team was withing talking distance. The other half was like ten steps away. Often times I could ask, discuss, solve problems without leaving the cube. Most of the communication is work related, no bullshit or mental masturbation that would unnecessarily distract others. Now we have moved to another part of the building and have larger space to occupy. At this point, everyone could pick their spot. Naturally all stupid spots are left empty (for the poor newcomers to occupy bwehaha). In the new arrangement, the development team is stretched across the floor and some of the key engineers are seated 'far' from each other - definitely not within talking distance. I have yet to experience how this works out but am getting concerned that team work and communication may have been traded for personal comfort. Finally the questions... What do you think is better office arrangement? Such that allows for free verbal communication but trading for some developer's comfort, or such that potentially hinders verbal communication but makes developer's more comfortable in their spot? Or maybe it does not matter at all and we will evolve to be efficient in any arrangement? What is your personal experience? Note - yes I read books and posts how workplace is important in our job. However in this case - we are all still in open space and the difference between the different spots are not really groundbreaking. So I'm thinking the little comfort that few developers gain is not worth the loss of easy communication.

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• What issues carry the highest risk in a software project?

  - by Mehrdad

  Clearly, software projects are different from other industries in terms of many things like for instance, quality assurance, project progress measurement, and many other things. Unique characteristics of software projects also makes the risk management process unique. Lots of issues in a project might lead it to unacceptable delay or failure to deliver business value. They might even make a complete disaster in the project. What are the deadliest risk factors in a software project? How to analyze, prevent and handle them? Particularly, I'm interested in the issues that you can detect from the beginning and you should keep an eye on (for example, you might be told about a third-party API that the current application uses and lacks documentation). Please share your experiences if they are relevant.

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• Daily standups- yea or nay?

  - by Fishtoaster

  How valuable (or not) do you think daily stand-up meetings are? If you're not familiar with it, this refers to a daily meeting often pushed by Scrum adherents (and some other general agile proponents). The idea is that you hold a daily meeting, timeboxed to 15 minutes, and in which everyone must stand (to encourage people to be to-the-point). In the meeting, you go around the room and each say: - What you did yesterday - What you plan to do today - Any blockers or impediments to your progress. Do you think this practice has value? Has anyone worked at a place that's done it, and what did you think?

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• Class as first-class object

  - by mrpyo

  Could a class be a first-class object? If yes, how would the implementation look? I mean, how could syntax for dynamically creating new classes look like? EDIT: I mean what example syntax could look like (I'm sorry, English is not my native language), but still I believe this question makes sense - how you give this functionality while keeping language consistent. For example how you create reference for new type. Do you make reference first-class object too and then use something like this: Reference<newType> r = new Reference<newType>(); r.set(value); Well this could get messy so you may just force user to use Object type references for dynamically created classes, but then you loose type-checking. I think creating concise syntax for this is interesting problem which solving could lead to better language design, maybe language which is metalanguage for itself (I wonder if this is possible).

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• Is this a good use for ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem?

  - by Matt Grande

  I have an application that, among other things, imports documents, then emails necessary parties to let them know that a document has been imported. It turns out that determining whom to email, then performing the emailing, is what's taking the longest. I was thinking of doing something like this: var document = ImportDocument(); ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(s => SendEmail(document.Id)); return document; ... similar to DelayedJob in Rails, if that helps. Does that make sense in this context? What would you do?

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• Scrum - how to carry over a partially complete User Story to the next Sprint without skewing the backlog

  - by Nick

  We're using Scrum and occasionally find that we can't quite finish a User Story in the sprint in which it was planned. In true Scrum style, we ship the software anyway and consider including the User Story in the next sprint during the next Sprint Planning session. Given that the User Story we are carrying over is partially complete, how do we estimate for it correctly in the next Sprint Planning session? We have considered: a) Adjusting the number of Story Points down to reflect just the work which remains to complete the User Story. Unfortunately this will mess up reporting the Product Backlog. b) Close the partially-completed User Story and raise a new one to implement the remainder of that feature, which will have fewer Story Points. This will affect our ability to retrospectively see what we didn't complete in that sprint and seems a bit time consuming. c) Not bother with either a or b and continue to guess during Sprint Planning saying things like "Well that User Story may be X story points, but I know it's 95% finished so I'm sure we can fit it in."

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• Can working exclusively with niche apps or tech hurt your career in software development? How to get out of the cycle? [closed]

  - by Keoma

  I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle. I've been at a pretty comfortable IT group for almost a decade. I got my start here working on web development, mostly CRUD, but have demonstrated the ability to figure out more complex problems. I'm not a rock star, but I have received many compliments on my programming aptitude, and technologists and architects have commented on my ability to pick things up (for example, I recently learned a very popular web framework that shall remain nameless since I don’t want to be identified). My problem is that, over time, my responsibilities have been shifting towards work such as support or ‘development’ with some rather niche products (afraid to mention here due to potential for being identified). Some of this work, if it includes anything resembling coding, is very menial scripting in languages such as Powershell or VBScript. The vast majority of the time, however, a typical day consists of going back and forth with the product’s vendor support to send them logs and apply configuration changes or patches they recommend. I’m basically starved for some actual software development. However, even though I’m more than capable of doing that development work (and actually do a much better job at it than anything else), our boss is more interested in the kind of work I mentioned above, her reasoning being that since no one else in the organization wants to do it, it must mean job security. This has been going on for close to 3 years, and the only reason I have held on is on the promise that we would eventually get more development projects assigned to us. Well, that turned out not to be true at all. A recent talk with the boss has just made it more explicitly clear, as she told me in no uncertain terms that it’s very likely that development work (web or otherwise) would go to another group. The reason given to me is that our we don’t have enough resources in our group to handle that. So now I find myself in the position that I either have to stay in what has essentially become a dead end IT job that is tied to the fortunes of a niche stack of apps, or try to find a position that will be better for my long term career. My problem (is it a problem?), however, is that compared to others, my development projects in the last three years are very sparse in number. To compound things, projects using the latest and most popular frameworks, amount to the big fat number of just one—with no work of that kind in the foreseeable future. I am very concerned that this sparseness in my resume is a deficit, and that it will hurt my chances of landing a different job. I’m also wondering how much it will hurt me, and whether that can be ameliorated with hobby projects of my own. I guess I’m looking for opinions. Thank you very much for reading.

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• Java: How to manage UDP client-server state

  - by user92947

  I am trying to write a Java application that works similar to MapReduce. There is a server and several workers. Workers may come and go as they please and the membership to the group has a soft-state. To become a part of the group, the worker must send a UDP datagram to the server, but to continue to be part of the group, the worker must send the UDP datagram to the server every 5 minutes. In order to accommodate temporary errors, a worker is allowed to miss as many as two consecutive periodic UDP datagrams. So, the server must keep track of the current set of workers as well as the last time each worker had sent a UDP datagram. I've implemented a class called WorkerListener that implements Runnable and listens to UDP datagrams on a particular UDP port. Now, to keep track of active workers, this class may maintain a HashSet (or HashMap). When a datagram is received, the server may query the HashSet to check if it is a new member. If so, it can add the new worker to the group by adding an entry into the HashSet. If not, it must reset a "timer" for the worker, noting that it has just heard from the corresponding worker. I'm using the word timer in a generic sense. It doesn't have to be a clock of sorts. Perhaps this could also be implemented using int or long variables. Also, the server must run a thread that continuously monitors the timers for the workers to see that a client that times out on two consecutive datagram intervals, it is removed from the HashSet. I don't want to do this in the WorkerListener thread because it would be blocking on the UDP datagram receive() function. If I create a separate thread to monitor the worker HashSet, it would need to be a different class, perhaps WorkerRegistrar. I must share the HashSet with that thread. Mutual exclusion must also be implemented, then. My question is, what is the best way to do this? Pointers to some sample implementation would be great. I want to use the barebones JDK implementation, and not some fancy state maintenance API that takes care of everything, because I want this to be a useful demonstration for a class that I am teaching. Thanks

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• Is there a better way to consume an ASP.NET Web API call in an MVC controller?

  - by davidisawesome

  In a new project I am creating for my work I am creating a fairly large ASP.NET Web API. The api will be in a separate visual studio solution that also contains all of my business logic and database interactions, Model classes as well. In the test application I am creating (which is asp.net mvc4), I want to be able to hit an api url I defined from the control and cast the return JSON to a Model class. The reason behind this is that I want to take advantage of strongly typing my views to a Model. This is all still in a proof of concept stage, so I have not done any performance testing on it, but I am curious if what I am doing is a good practice, or if I am crazy for even going down this route. Here is the code on the client controller: public class HomeController : Controller { protected string dashboardUrlBase = "http://localhost/webapi/api/StudentDashboard/"; public ActionResult Index() //This view is strongly typed against User { //testing against Joe Bob string adSAMName = "jBob"; WebClient client = new WebClient(); string url = dashboardUrlBase + "GetUserRecord?userName=" + adSAMName; //'User' is a Model class that I have defined. User result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<User>(client.DownloadString(url)); return View(result); } . . . } If I choose to go this route another thing to note is I am loading several partial views in this page (as I will also do in subsequent pages). The partial views are loaded via an $.ajax call that hits this controller and does basically the same thing as the code above: Instantiate a new WebClient Define the Url to hit Deserialize the result and cast it to a Model Class. So it is possible (and likely) I could be performing the same actions 4-5 times for a single page. Is there a better method to do this that will: Let me keep strongly typed views. Do my work on the server rather than on the client (this is just a preference since I can write C# faster than I can write javascript).

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• What functionality should a (basic) mock framework have?

  - by user1175327

  If i would start on writing a simple Mock framework, then what are the things that a basic mock framework MUST have? Obviously mocking any object, but what about assertions and perhaps other things? When I think of how I would write my own mock framework then I realise how much I really know (or don't know) and what I would trip up on. So this is more for educational purposes. Of course I did research and this is what i've come up with that a minimal mocking framework should be able to do. Now my question in this whole thing is, am I missing some important details in my ideas? Mocking Mocking a class: Should be able to mock any class. The Mock should preserve the properties and their original values as they were set in the original class. All method implementations are empty. Calls to methods of Mock: The Mock framework must be able to define what a mocked method must return. IE: $MockObj->CallTo('SomeMethod')->Returns('some value'); Assertions To my understanding mocking frameworks also have a set of assertions. These are the ones I think are most important (taken from SimpleTest). expect($method, $args) Arguments must match if called expectAt($timing, $method, $args) Arguments must match when called on the $timing'th time expectCallCount($method, $count) The method must be called exactly this many times expectMaximumCallCount($method, $count) Call this method no more than $count times expectMinimumCallCount($method, $count) Must be called at least $count times expectNever($method) Must never be called expectOnce($method, $args) Must be called once and with the expected arguments if supplied expectAtLeastOnce($method, $args) Must be called at least once, and always with any expected arguments And that's basically, as far as I understand, what a mock framework should be able to do. But is this really everything? Because it currently doesn't seem like a big deal to build something like this. But that's also the reason why I have the feeling that i'm missing some important details about such a framework. So is my understanding right about a mock framework? Or am i missing alot of details?

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• Licensing a collaborative research project

  - by Marcus Jones

  I am involved with an international research project which involves many different universities, national labs, and companies. The project is developed by national grants and in-kind support. One task in the project is to develop code to streamline workflow in our domain (energy simulation) by scripting common pre- and post-processing tasks for different tools. We want this code to be freely distributable to the simulation community. How can we ensure that this effort is digestible by the legal departments of these different parties such that the people involved can freely code?

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• Where should the database and mail parameters be stored in a Symfony2 app?

  - by Songo

  In the default folder structure for a Symfony2 project the database and mail server credentials are stored in parameters.yml file inside ProjectRoot/app/config/parameters.yml with these default values: parameters: database_driver: pdo_mysql database_host: 127.0.0.1 database_port: null database_name: symfony database_user: root database_password: null mailer_transport: smtp mailer_host: 127.0.0.1 mailer_user: null mailer_password: null locale: en secret: ThisTokenIsNotSoSecretChangeIt During development we change these parameters to the development database and mail servers. This file is checked into the source code repository. The problem is when we want to deploy to the production server. We are thinking about automating the deployment process by checking out the project from git and deploy it to the production server. The thing is that our project manager has to manually update these parameters after each update. The production database and mail servers parameters are confidential and only our project manager knows them. I need a way to automate this step and suggestion on where to store the production parameters until they are applied?

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• Do support sites like Stack Overflow upset the paid-support open source model?

  - by ajax81

  In order to stay relevant in the marketplace, I'm researching new business models for my software company. The open source model with paid support seems like a good fit for our product, but I have concerns about whether or not a paid support model is viable in an era where top-notch help is readily available for free on sites like those in the Stack Exchange network. Case in point -- I moved my employees to Ubuntu last year because I didn't want to pay for Win 7 licenses and new hardware (plus, the mono platform was highly attractive). My staff had no Linux experience, but were able to achieve relative competency in about 120 days with the help of AskUbuntu, Stack Overflow, and a few "For Dummies" books. We did employ an Ubuntu consultant for 7 days to provide training and support, but beyond that spent $0.00 on any kind of paid expertise. In regards to my due diligence, I ran a 3 month beta of the freemium-paid-support model with one of our smaller customers, and achieved mediocre results. I'd like to think its because our software is so stable and easy to use that the customer didn't need much paid support, but I suspect that they circumvented the terms of our SLA in the same manner that we did with the move to Ubuntu. Does anyone out there has any thoughts, advice, or experience relevant to the move I'm considering? What worked, what didn't, etc?

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• What could be the best way to generalize data from Facebook and Twitter?

  - by Sjaak van der Heide

  I am not sure if this is the best subsite to ask this question, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit on the normal or facebook SO page... I've been asked to make a general API for connecting to several Social Media platforms (at the moment Facebook and Twitter). I have already realised both of them seperately. Meaning I retrieve the data I need from both Facebook and Twitter and hold the data in it's own dataclass. In my case a list of FacebookTimelineItems and a list of TwitterTimelineItems. now the hard part is taking the parts that are used in both (username, id, message and such) and make 1 general class that is eventually passed on to who/whatever sent the call to my API. these are two pics of the data classes I have: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/703/facebookdata.png/ http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/204/twitterdata.png/ probably not 100% correct but it gives an idea what it looks like. Now I've been having several idea about how to go about and generalize the two, which is harder then I thought at first. Create an interface (TimelineItem) and let the other classes extend that one. this way I'll always be sure I have a class that contains at least the basic info I need. downside is that deserializing the JSON seems to be a nightmare. Use the two dataclasses I have and combine them into a new class afterwards, then pass that one back to whoever requested it. This would probably work but I get the idea it's not the best way to tackle this problem, and is pretty dodgy IF I get it working. Or, in case of the other two being nearly impossible. Keep the two seperated in the front end, and go sit in the corner crying because I've just figured out you can't lump together facebook and twitter... Note: I don't have to make the front end part (view), I just make sure the Model is nicely filled with data :) I hope I placed this in the right section, if I didn't I apologise and would like to know where I should go with my question. Thanks in advance for any replied/ideas/opinions on this.

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• What is Rainbow (not the CMS)

  - by Jeremy Thompson

  I was reading this excellent blog article regarding speeding up the badge page and in the last comment the author @waffles (a.k.a Sam Saffron) mentions these tools: dapper and a bunch of custom helpers like rainbow, sql builder etc Dapper and sql builder was easy to look up but rainbow keeps pointing me to a CMS, can someone please point me to the real source? Thanks. Obviously the architecture of these [SE] sites is uber cool and ultra fast so no comments on that thanks.

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• Backtrack My "Education"

  - by perl.j

  About a year or so ago, I decided to start programming. I really, just jumped into a language (Perl) and went from there. What I regret is that I just jumped in: I didn't learn the basics (if you would call them basics). I didn't learn about Computer Science. This issue, I believe, is holding me back. Where should I "restart"? Are there any books, articles, etc. that I should read? Are there any topics an experienced programmer should know? What's your advice? Thanks! Please don't advise me to take a college/high-school class.

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• Microsoft Public License Question

  - by ryanzec

  Let preface this by saying that I understand that any advice I may receive is not to be taken as 100% correct, I am just looking for what people's understand of what this license is. I have been looking for a library that allow be to deal with archived compressed files (like zip files) and so far the best one I have found is DotNetZip. The only concern I have is that I am not familiar with the Microsoft Public License. While I plan to release a portion of my project (a web application platform) freely (MIT/BSD style) there are a few things. One is that I don't plan on actually releasing the source code, just the compiled project. Another thing is that I don't plan on releasing everything freely, only a subset of the application. Those are reason why I stay away form (L)GPL code. Is this something allowed while using 3rd party libraries that are licensed under the Microsoft Public License? EDIT The part about the Microsoft license that concerns me is Section 3 (D) which says (full license here): If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license. I don't know what is meant by 'software'. My assumption would be that 'software' only refers to the library included under the license (being DotNetZip) and that is doesn't extends over to my code which includes the DotNetZip library. If that is the case then everything is fine as I have no issues keeping the license for DotNetZip when release this project in compiled form while having my code under its own license. If 'software' also include my code that include the DotNetZip library then that would be an issue (as it would basically act like GPL with the copyleft sense).

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• Interfacing the payment systems

  - by etranger

  Hello all. I'm a complete newbie to using online payment systems for web projects, and can't really think of where to start. Let's assume that web system in question needs to generate some income online, and the business idea/functionality is in place, while organizing cash flow is the only unsolved problem. Points of interest are how the custom developed software interfaces to payment systems, and how the resulting income is available to the owner. I do understand that there are probably hundreds of systems out there, but to be more specific on which of them suit, I'd have to know how they work, and that's where I don't feel like understanding much. Thanks in advance.

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• What is your most unusual javascript concept you've ever seen ?

  - by Cybrix

  Hi, I've learned javascript at school but since I'm working with it and study about it every day, I've found very particular aspect of javascript that I didn't know about. Which at first, was very hard to understand for me and finally, I found it very usefull and easy to implement. And in the final, it gives to my code some kind of "beauty". An example I've once seen: function getter( input ) { result = { foo1 : 'bar1', foo2 : 'bar2', foo3 : 'bar3' }[input] || input || "default"; return result; } Do you guys have other examples of particular use you make of Javascript ? Thank you PS: I use the term particular use because it might be unusual for any Javascript beginner. I believe this question is most likely to belong to the community wiki.

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• What advantages does developing applications for smartphones have over developing the same application as a web application?

  - by Alfredo O

  Let's take the Facebook application as an example. Why did they develop an application when the users could just access to their page and do the same? For me that represents more maintenance and more cost because for each feature added to the web application that feature will have to be added to the smartphone application as well. So why would I want to develop more than once (for each patform iOS, Android, etc) when I could just have one web application? What benefits do I get? The only one that comes to my mind is GPS feature. EDIT: My question is more oriented towards business applications that are going to be used only by some members of the company, it's not about selling the application (private use). So contrary to what some answers say about that by developing as a smartphone application it will benefit from more sells because of the "smartphone stores" for me this point is not important because the application is for private use. By developing the application as a web application it means that it can be accessed through smartphone browser and also in a PC (any capable browser), but developing as a native application would limit this to only some kind of smartphone so we would be limiting the use. On the other hand developing it as a web application means that in order to access the application an Internet connection must be available. So keeping this in mind how would you convince your boss to write the application for a given smartphone platform (iOS/Android) vs developing it as a web application?

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• Linking Libraries in iOS?

  - by Bob Dole

  This is probably a totally noob question but I have missing links in my mind when thinking about linking libraries in iOS. I usually just add a new library that's been cross compiled and set the build and linker paths without really know what I'm doing. I'm hoping someone can help me fill in some gaps. Let's take the OpenCV library for instance. I have this totally working btw because of a really well written tutorial( http://niw.at/articles/2009/03/14/using-opencv-on-iphone/en ), but I'm just wanting to know what is exactly going on. What I'm thinking is happening is that when I build OpenCV for iOS is that your creating object code that gets placed in the .a files. This object code is just the implementation files( .m ) compiled. One reason you would want to do this is to make it hard to see the source code and so that you don't have to compile that source code every time. The .h files won't be put in the library ( .a ). You include the .h in your source files and these header files communicate with the object code library ( .a ) in some way. You also have to include the header files for your library in the Build Path and the Library itself in the Linker Path. So, is the way I view linking libraries correct? If , not can someone correct me on this ?

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• Why should I declare a class as an abstract class?

  - by Pied Piper

  I know the syntax, rules applied to abstract class and I want know usage of an abstract class Abstract class can not be instantiated directly but can be extended by other class What is the advantage of doing so? How it is different from an Interface? I know that one class can implement multiple interfaces but can only extend one abstract class. Is that only difference between an interface and an abstract class? I am aware about usage of an Interface. I have learned that from Event delegation model of AWT in Java. In which situations I should declare class as an abstract class? What is benefits of that?

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• Continuous integration testing server: hosted, own desktop, or own server

  - by Victor

  For testing, I am planning to run a continuous integration testing. There are mainly two options: hosted, or own desktop/server. I will break it into 3 options I have: Hosted: Economical, $10-20/month for a small app Less setup, the CI company manage all hardware and software Desktop: I could just buy a simple, cheap desktop as a test server (about $500). Used server: My current office is offloading some old Dell rack server (Probably dual core Xeon, which I can purchase for $50 or less Please advise me which best serves me for a small team of 2-3 developers. Thanks.

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