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• Enterprise vs Real time embedded systems

  - by JakeFisher

  In university I have 2 options for software architecture: Enterprise Real time embedded systems I would be very glad if someone can give me a brief explanation of what those are. I am interested in following criterias: Brief overview Complexity and interest. So does knowledge costs time? Area of usage Profit(salary) Working tools, programs. Might be some text editor, uml editor. Something else?

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• Android Development: MVC vs MVVM

  - by Mel

  I've started coding for android and I'm having difficulty trying to properly partition my code. I always end up with a very tight coupling between my UI logic and the actual controls I use to represent them. I have background in both WPF MVVM and ASP.net MVC so I'm familiar with those patterns. After some digging, I found Android Binding. It seems nice and fits nicely with my WPF background. However, it bugs me that its not built in. I'm pretty sure that the android makers have thought of this when designing the android programming interface. So my question is, what is the best practice pattern to use when developing in android, if any. I have looked and looked at their site but didn't find anything...

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• Removing hard-coded values and defensive design vs YAGNI

  - by Ben Scott

  First a bit of background. I'm coding a lookup from Age - Rate. There are 7 age brackets so the lookup table is 3 columns (From|To|Rate) with 7 rows. The values rarely change - they are legislated rates (first and third columns) that have stayed the same for 3 years. I figured that the easiest way to store this table without hard-coding it is in the database in a global configuration table, as a single text value containing a CSV (so "65,69,0.05,70,74,0.06" is how the 65-69 and 70-74 tiers would be stored). Relatively easy to parse then use. Then I realised that to implement this I would have to create a new table, a repository to wrap around it, data layer tests for the repo, unit tests around the code that unflattens the CSV into the table, and tests around the lookup itself. The only benefit of all this work is avoiding hard-coding the lookup table. When talking to the users (who currently use the lookup table directly - by looking at a hard copy) the opinion is pretty much that "the rates never change." Obviously that isn't actually correct - the rates were only created three years ago and in the past things that "never change" have had a habit of changing - so for me to defensively program this I definitely shouldn't store the lookup table in the application. Except when I think YAGNI. The feature I am implementing doesn't specify that the rates will change. If the rates do change, they will still change so rarely that maintenance isn't even a consideration, and the feature isn't actually critical enough that anything would be affected if there was a delay between the rate change and the updated application. I've pretty much decided that nothing of value will be lost if I hard-code the lookup, and I'm not too concerned about my approach to this particular feature. My question is, as a professional have I properly justified that decision? Hard-coding values is bad design, but going to the trouble of removing the values from the application seems to violate the YAGNI principle. EDIT To clarify the question, I'm not concerned about the actual implementation. I'm concerned that I can either do a quick, bad thing, and justify it by saying YAGNI, or I can take a more defensive, high-effort approach, that even in the best case ultimately has low benefits. As a professional programmer does my decision to implement a design that I know is flawed simply come down to a cost/benefit analysis?

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• problems with build params for accepts_nested_attributes_for

  - by holden

  I'm trying to add the user_id to a nested attribute that gets built by a parent controller but it doesn't seem to have the desired effect? Ie. I have a model called Place.rb which accepts_nested_attributes_for :reviews The nested attribute works fine and I build it inside the Places controller like so... @review = @place.reviews.build(:user_id => current_user.id) I was previously adding the user thru the form, but would like to do it thru the controller so that it only adds the user_id on creation, as it might get updated by someone else and i don't want the update changing the user_id... old way which works: <%= e.label :content, "Review" %><br /> <%= e.text_area :content, :rows => 20, :class => 'jquery_ckeditor' %><br /> <%= e.hidden_field :user_id, :value => current_user.id %> but thru the controller the build method with options has no effect? Any ideas? Can I not do this thru the build?

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• virtualbox host | Ubuntu vs XP

  - by iambriansreed

  In order to lengthen the lifespan of my machine I am replacing the weakest link, the hard drive and installing a new OS. I had planned on using xp pro as my virtualbox host and ubuntu as guest. After messing with ubuntu desktop and server I am really impressed and am thinking of reversing the virtualbox setup; ubuntu host xp guest. I would use XP for Adobe Fireworks, Netflix, and iTunes (maybe) that's pretty much it. Any reason not to do ubuntu host with xp guest? I know the xp vbox will run slower as a guest but really how much slower? It's a desktop. 4gb ram, 500gb disk, Pent D 3.2 ghz

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• Errors In Programmatically Running ANT Build In Eclipse

  - by Sujay

  I am trying to run an ANT script through a small Java program and I keep on encountering the following error: build: Exception in thread "main" build.xml:7: Problem: failed to create task or type eclipse.refreshLocal Cause: The name is undefined. Action: Check the spelling. Action: Check that any custom tasks/types have been declared. Action: Check that any <presetdef>/<macrodef> declarations have taken place. at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.getNotFoundException(UnknownElement.java:487) at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.makeObject(UnknownElement.java:419) at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.maybeConfigure(UnknownElement.java:163) I used to get this problem when I used to execute the build file manually. All I had to do to make Eclipse run this build was to go to Run External Tools External Tools Configuration JRE and select "Run in the same JRE as the workspace" and then attempt to execute. But I have no idea how to achieve the same effect through my code. Any suggestion would really be appreciated. Note that this has reference to a previous question that I asked over here

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• Normals vs Normal maps

  - by KaiserJohaan

  I am using Assimp asset importer (http://assimp.sourceforge.net/lib_html/index.html) to parse 3d models. So far, I've simply pulled out the normal vectors which are defined for each vertex in my meshes. Yet I have also found various tutorials on normal maps... As I understand it for normal maps, the normal vectors are stored in each texel of a normal map, and you pull these out of the normal texture in the shader. Why is there two ways to get the normals, which one is considered best-practice and why?

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• Canonicalization issue regarding academic URL vs. blog URL

  - by user5395

  I'm sorry if what I am about to write is long-winded. I only wish to be clear. I am an academic in the scientific community. I maintain a web site for my research, teaching, and other professional activities. Until recently, the content for this site was hosted in a directory on my university department's own server. The address is of the typical form (universityname).edu/~(myusername) I decided that I wanted to use WordPress in order to host and manage my page. So I set up a WordPress.com blog and then replaced the index.html file in (universityname).edu/~(myusername) with a new one consisting of a single frame, containing the WordPress.com blog. Now when a user visits (universityname).edu/~(myusername), he or she sees the blog instead. This has been pretty nice because, even when the user clicks on links between pages or posts in the blog, the only thing showing up in the address bar of the browser is www.(universityname).edu/~(myusername), because the blog is constrained to a frame. However, the effect of this change on the search side of things has not been so kind to me. Before, when someone searched for my name in Google, the first result was always (universityname).edu/~(myusername). This is the most desirable outcome, for professional reasons. (Having my academic URL come up first suggests that I am an accredited professional, and not just some crank with a blog!) But now, Google seems to have canonicalized my web presence under the blog's WordPress.com address. It has completely forgotten about my academic URL and considers the WordPress.com address to be the best address representing me on the web. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn't support the canonical tag, so I can't tell the blog to advertise itself as my academic URL in the header. (It doesn't seem to help at all that I have used the WordPress.com dashboard to turn on no-indexing of the blog.) One obvious solution would be to use the departmental server to host my content again, and use a local installation of the WordPress platform. For reasons beyond my control, the platform will not be deployed on the departmental server at this time. Another solution would be to use shared hosting with WordPress.org support, because the WordPress.org platform does support the canonical tag (albeit via a plug-in). But this seems to usually require purchasing a domain name and other fees, and there is no guarantee that Google will listen to the canonical tag (it might use whatever domain name I end up with instead). Is there a way I can more cleverly integrate the WordPress.com blog into a page hosted on my department's server? Is there some PHP code I can write to retrieve the blog's contents in a way that Google won't treat as a link / "perceive" the blog? Please note: I am a PHP novice at best. I just feel there should be a simpler solution to all this, within the constraints of what I have described above. Thanks!

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• In SEO & SEM terms, use of a international domain vs a local domain

  - by Paddy

  In terms of SEO & SEM if I have a .com and a .co.uk. Would it be better to use the .com and park the .co.uk, If I am selling the product locally (in the uk) and later moving out into the international market? Will I struggle more to compete locally with regards to local searches and Google Adwords, if I make the .com as the primary domain? Does the parking of the .co.uk or the .com effect the relevance of a web domains search locally and internationally?

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• BDD/TDD vs JAD?

  - by Jonathan Conway

  I've been proposing that my workplace implement Behavior-Driven-Development, by writing high-level specifications in a scenario format, and in such a way that one could imagine writing a test for it. I do know that working against testable specifications tends to increase developer productivity. And I can already think of several examples where this would be the case on our own project. However it's difficult to demonstrate the value of this to the business. This is because we already have a Joint Application Development (JAD) process in place, in which developers, management, user-experience and testers all get together to agree on a common set of requirements. So, they ask, why should developers work against the test-cases created by testers? These are for verification and are based on the higher-level specs created by the UX team, which the developers currently work off. This, they say, is sufficient for developers and there's no need to change how the specs are written. They seem to have a point. What is the actual benefit of BDD/TDD, if you already have a test-team who's test cases are fully compatible with the higher-level specs currently given to the developers?

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• Akka react vs receive

  - by Will I Am

  I am reading my way through Akka tutorials, but I'd like to get my feet wet with a real-life scenario. I'd like to write both a connectionless UDP server (an echo/ping-pong service) and a TCP server (also an echo service, but it keeps the connection open after it replies). My first question is, is this a good experimental use case for Akka, or am I better served with more common paradigms like IOCP? Would you do something like this with Akka in production? Although I understand conceptually the difference between react() and receive(), I struggle to choose one or the other for the two models. In the UDP model, there is no concept of who the sender is on the server, once the pong is sent, so should I use receive()? In the TCP model, the connection is maintained on the server after the pong, so should I use react()? If someone could give me some guidance, and maybe an opinion on how you'd design these two use cases, it would take me a long way. I have found a number of examples, but they didn't have explanations as to why they chose the paradigms they did.

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• Just Another Web Service (JAWS) vs SOA

  Over the last few years SOA has been a hot topic lending it to be abused by many that have no understanding of the concept. In my opinion, one of the largest issues facing SOA is the lack of understanding and experience implementing SOA by business and IT alike. I just recently deployed a new web services that is called by multiple service clients. Would you call this SOA because it is a web service that can be called by any requesting client? In my opinion, this is not SOA; instead it is Just Another Web Service (JAWS).  Just because a company creates a web service does not mean that they are using SOA, in fact it only means that they are using a web service. SOA is an architectural style that focuses on the design of systems based on the consumer and providers thorough the use of contracts.  With this approach SOA needs to be applied for the top down in order for it to reach its full potential. In the case of the web service, the service is just a small part of the entire system that is reusable and has the flexibility to change. In order for a company in this case to move towards SOA then they need to define business processes that can be shared through the use of reusable software and loose coupling. Once the company’s thought and development process change to address changes in this manner they can start to become more SOA.

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• Corona SDK (Lua) vs Native Obj-C for iPhone only word puzzle type game [closed]

  - by dodgy_coder

  I am trying to decide on whether to use the Corona SDK & Lua versus native Objective-C to develop an iOS app. This will be the first game on any smartphone I have developed and so its not that ambitious - a single player word puzzle type game - something sort of like scrabble. The advantages of Corona I can see are: Lua is probably easier to learn than Obj-C (shorter learning curve) meaning a possibly quicker development time Possibility to port to Android once its finished Advantages of native Obj-C are: Access to all and latest features of iOS More / faster available libraries Has anyone made this decision before? Are there any major advantages or disadvantages I've missed or got wrong here? Thanks.

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• How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)   From something as simple as relating Tasks to Check-in’s or being able to see the top 10 files in your codebase that are causing the most Bugs, to identifying which Bugs and Requirements are in which Release. All that information is available and more in TFS. Although all of this tradability is available within TFS you do need to understand that it is not for free. Well… I say that, but if you are using TFS properly you will have this information with no additional work except for firing up the reporting. Using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server you can relate every line of code changes all the way up to requirements and back down through Test Cases to the Test Results. Figure: The only thing missing is Build In order to build the relationship model below we need to examine how each of the relationships get there. Each member of your team from programmer to tester and Business Analyst to Business have their roll to play to knit this together. Figure: The relationships required to make this work can get a little confusing If Build is added to this to relate Work Items to Builds and with knowledge of which builds are in which environments you can easily identify what is contained within a Release. Figure: How are things progressing Along with the ability to produce the progress and trend reports the tractability that is built into TFS can be used to fulfil most audit requirements out of the box, and augmented to fulfil the rest. In order to understand the relationships, lets look at each of the important Artifacts and how they are associated with each other… Requirements – The root of all knowledge Requirements are the thing that the business cares about delivering. These could be derived as User Stories or Business Requirements Documents (BRD’s) but they should be what the Business asks for. Requirements can be related to many of the Artifacts in TFS, so lets look at the model: Figure: If the centre of the world was a requirement We can track which releases Requirements were scheduled in, but this can change over time as more details come to light. Figure: Who edited the Requirement and when There is also the ability to query Work Items based on the History of changed that were made to it. This is particularly important with Requirements. It might not be enough to say what Requirements were completed in a given but also to know which Requirements were ever assigned to a particular release. Figure: Some magic required, but result still achieved As an augmentation to this it is also possible to run a query that shows results from the past, just as if we had a time machine. You can take any Query in the system and add a “Asof” clause at the end to query historical data in the operational store for TFS. select <fields> from WorkItems [where <condition>] [order by <fields>] [asof <date>] Figure: Work Item Query Language (WIQL) format In order to achieve this you do need to save the query as a *.wiql file to your local computer and edit it in notepad, but one imported into TFS you run it any time you want. Figure: Saving Queries locally can be useful All of these Audit features are available throughout the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system within TFS. Tasks – Where the real work gets done Tasks are the work horse of the development team, but they only as useful as Excel if you do not relate them properly to other Artifacts. Figure: The Task Work Item Type has its own relationships Requirements should be broken down into Tasks that the development team work from to build what is required by the business. This may be done by a small dedicated group or by everyone that will be working on the software team but however it happens all of the Tasks create should be a Child of a Requirement Work Item Type. Figure: Tasks are related to the Requirement Tasks should be used to track the day-to-day activities of the team working to complete the software and as such they should be kept simple and short lest developers think they are more trouble than they are worth. Figure: Task Work Item Type has a narrower purpose Although the Task Work Item Type describes the work that will be done the actual development work involves making changes to files that are under Source Control. These changes are bundled together in a single atomic unit called a Changeset which is committed to TFS in a single operation. During this operation developers can associate Work Item with the Changeset. Figure: Tasks are associated with Changesets   Changesets – Who wrote this crap Changesets themselves are just an inventory of the changes that were made to a number of files to complete a Task. Figure: Changesets are linked by Tasks and Builds   Figure: Changesets tell us what happened to the files in Version Control Although comments can be changed after the fact, the inventory and Work Item associations are permanent which allows us to Audit all the way down to the individual change level. Figure: On Check-in you can resolve a Task which automatically associates it Because of this we can view the history on any file within the system and see how many changes have been made and what Changesets they belong to. Figure: Changes are tracked at the File level What would be even more powerful would be if we could view these changes super imposed over the top of the lines of code. Some people call this a blame tool because it is commonly used to find out which of the developers introduced a bug, but it can also be used as another method of Auditing changes to the system. Figure: Annotate shows the lines the Annotate functionality allows us to visualise the relationship between the individual lines of code and the Changesets. In addition to this you can create a Label and apply it to a version of your version control. The problem with Label’s is that they can be changed after they have been created with no tractability. This makes them practically useless for any sort of compliance audit. So what do you use? Branches – And why we need them Branches are a really powerful tool for development and release management, but they are most important for audits. Figure: One way to Audit releases The R1.0 branch can be created from the Label that the Build creates on the R1 line when a Release build was created. It can be created as soon as the Build has been signed of for release. However it is still possible that someone changed the Label between this time and its creation. Another better method can be to explicitly link the Build output to the Build. Builds – Lets tie some more of this together Builds are the glue that helps us enable the next level of tractability by tying everything together. Figure: The dashed pieces are not out of the box but can be enabled When the Build is called and starts it looks at what it has been asked to build and determines what code it is going to get and build. Figure: The folder identifies what changes are included in the build The Build sets a Label on the Source with the same name as the Build, but the Build itself also includes the latest Changeset ID that it will be building. At the end of the Build the Build Agent identifies the new Changesets it is building by looking at the Check-ins that have occurred since the last Build. Figure: What changes have been made since the last successful Build It will then use that information to identify the Work Items that are associated with all of the Changesets Changesets are associated with Build and change the “Integrated In” field of those Work Items . Figure: Find all of the Work Items to associate with The “Integrated In” field of all of the Work Items identified by the Build Agent as being integrated into the completed Build are updated to reflect the Build number that successfully integrated that change. Figure: Now we know which Work Items were completed in a build Now that we can link a single line of code changed all the way back through the Task that initiated the action to the Requirement that started the whole thing and back down to the Build that contains the finished Requirement. But how do we know wither that Requirement has been fully tested or even meets the original Requirements? Test Cases – How we know we are done The only way we can know wither a Requirement has been completed to the required specification is to Test that Requirement. In TFS there is a Work Item type called a Test Case Test Cases enable two scenarios. The first scenario is the ability to track and validate Acceptance Criteria in the form of a Test Case. If you agree with the Business a set of goals that must be met for a Requirement to be accepted by them it makes it both difficult for them to reject a Requirement when it passes all of the tests, but also provides a level of tractability and validation for audit that a feature has been built and tested to order. Figure: You can have many Acceptance Criteria for a single Requirement It is crucial for this to work that someone from the Business has to sign-off on the Test Case moving from the  “Design” to “Ready” states. The Second is the ability to associate an MS Test test with the Test Case thereby tracking the automated test. This is useful in the circumstance when you want to Track a test and the test results of a Unit Test designed to test the existence of and then re-existence of a a Bug. Figure: Associating a Test Case with an automated Test Although it is possible it may not make sense to track the execution of every Unit Test in your system, there are many Integration and Regression tests that may be automated that it would make sense to track in this way. Bug – Lets not have regressions In order to know wither a Bug in the application has been fixed and to make sure that it does not reoccur it needs to be tracked. Figure: Bugs are the centre of their own world If the fix to a Bug is big enough to require that it is broken down into Tasks then it is probably a Requirement. You can associate a check-in with a Bug and have it tracked against a Build. You would also have one or more Test Cases to prove the fix for the Bug. Figure: Bugs have many associations This allows you to track Bugs / Defects in your system effectively and report on them. Change Request – I am not a feature In the CMMI Process template Change Requests can also be easily tracked through the system. In some cases it can be very important to track Change Requests separately as an Auditor may want to know what was changed and who authorised it. Again and similar to Bugs, if the Change Request is big enough that it would require to be broken down into Tasks it is in reality a new feature and should be tracked as a Requirement. Figure: Make sure your Change Requests only Affect Requirements and not rewrite them Conclusion Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server together provide an exceptional Application Lifecycle Management platform that can help your team comply with even the harshest of Compliance requirements while still enabling them to be Agile. Most Audits are heavy on required documentation but most of that information is captured for you as long a you do it right. You don’t even need every team member to understand it all as each of the Artifacts are relevant to a different type of team member. Business Analysts manage Requirements and Change Requests Programmers manage Tasks and check-in against Change Requests and Bugs Testers manage Bugs and Test Cases Build Masters manage Builds Although there is some crossover there are still rolls or “hats” that are worn. Do you thing this is all achievable? Have I missed anything that you think should be there?

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• Subsumption architecture vs. perceptual control theory

  - by Yasir G.

  I'm a new person to AI field and I have to research and compare 2 different architectures for a thesis I'm writing. Before you scream (homework thread), I've been reading on these 2 topics only to find that I'm confusing myself more.. let me first start with stating briefly what I know so far. Subsumption is based on the fact that targets of a system are different in sophistication, thus that requires them to be added as layers, each layer can suppress (modify) the command of the layers below it, and there are inhibitors to stop signals from execution lets say. PCT stresses on the fact that there are nodes to handle environmental changes (negative feedback), so the inputs coming from an environment go through a comparator node and then an action is generated by that node, HPCT or (Hierarchical PCT) is based on nesting these cycles inside each other so a small cycle to avoid crashing would be nested in a more sophisticated cycle that targets a certain location for example. My questions, am I getting this the right way? am I missing any critical understanding about these 2 models? also any idea where I can find simplified explanations for each theory (so far been struggling trying to understand the papers from Google scholar :< ) /Y

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• Linux Distro Switching: Pro vs. Con

  Linux users have a habit of changing distros faster than you can say Ubuntu. Does this practice hurt of help Linux's development?

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• Switch vs Polymorphism when dealing with model and view

  - by Raphael Oliveira

  I can't figure out a better solution to my problem. I have a view controller that presents a list of elements. Those elements are models that can be an instance of B, C, D, etc and inherit from A. So in that view controller, each item should go to a different screen of the application and pass some data when the user select one of them. The two alternatives that comes to my mind are (please ignore the syntax, it is not a specific language) 1) switch (I know that sucks) //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); switch(a.type) { case b: B b = (B)a; go to screen X; x.v1 = b.v1; // fill X with b data x.v2 = b.v2; case c: go to screen Y; etc... } } 2) polymorphism //inside the view controller void onClickItem(int index) { A a = items.get(index); Screen s = new (a.getDestinationScreen()); //ignore the syntax s.v1 = a.v1; // fill s with information about A s.v2 = a.v2; show(s); } //inside B Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(X); } //inside C Class getDestinationScreen(void) { return Class(Y); } My problem with solution 2 is that since B, C, D, etc are models, they shouldn't know about view related stuff. Or should they in that case?

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• [News] L'analyseur de d?pendances de VS 2010

  Visual Studio 2010 RC sort dans les jours prochains. L'occasion pour Jason Zander de montrer sa fonctionnalit? pr?f?r?e, le graphe de d?pendances et ses points d'extensibilit? : "I?m guessing there is a good chance you didn?t wind up getting a fantastic set of documentation or architecture for some of those projects. (...) Generating a dependency graph with VS2010 Ultimate is easy using the Architecture, Generate Dependency Graph menu:". D?couvrez les graphes ...

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• CRM vs VRM

  - by David Dorf

  In a previous post, I discussed the potential power of combining social, interest, and location graphs in order to personalize marketing and shopping experiences for consumers.  Marketing companies have been trying to collect detailed information for that very purpose, a large majority of which comes from tracking people on the internet.  But their approaches stem from the one-way nature of traditional advertising.  With TV, radio, and magazines there is no opportunity to truly connect to customers, which has trained marketing companies to [covertly] collect data and segment customers into easily identifiable groups.  To a large extent, we think of this as CRM. But what if we turned this viewpoint upside-down to accommodate for the two-way nature of social media?  The notion of marketing as conversations was the basis for the Cluetrain, an early attempt at drawing attention to the fact that customers are actually unique humans.  A more practical implementation is Project VRM, which is a reverse CRM of sorts.  Instead of vendors managing their relationships with customers, customers manage their relationships with vendors. Your shopping experience is not really controlled by you; rather, its controlled by the retailer and advertisers.  And unfortunately, they typically don't give you a say in the matter.  Yes, they might tailor the content for "female age 25-35 interested in shoes" but that's not really the essence of you, is it?  A better approach is to the let consumers volunteer information about themselves.  And why wouldn't they if it means a better, more relevant shopping experience?  I'd gladly list out my likes and dislikes in exchange for getting rid of all those annoying cookies on my harddrive. I really like this diagram from Beyond SocialCRM as it captures the differences between CRM and VRM. The closest thing to VRM I can find is Buyosphere, a start-up that allows consumers to track their shopping history across many vendors, then share it appropriately.  Also, Amazon does a pretty good job allowing its customers to edit their profile, which includes everything you've ever purchased from Amazon.  You can mark items as gifts, or explicitly exclude them from their recommendation engine.  This is a win-win for both the consumer and retailer. So here is my plea to retailers: Instead of trying to infer my interests from snapshots of my day, please just ask me.  We'll both have a better experience in the long-run.

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• Experience vs. versatility

  - by Florin Bombeanu

  Let's say a .NET programmer works at a company which provides software on demand, not as a product. The programmer works in WPF for a period of time and he/she invests lots of time in it. He/she get very good at WPF and Windows Forms and desktop development in general. But the company has to provide a web application now, so the developer has to learn MVC or Web Forms. He/she is not experienced in web development so he/she starts investing time in this new technology and in time they get good at it. But this time the company has to provide a Sharepoint solution, and so on. What is more important: Being very very good at a certain technology, Or be as versatile as possible knowing less in each technology but covering a greater area of expertise? Should the programmer keep studying and working in WPF until he/she reaches a guru level or is it a good thing that they had to learn other technologies as well? I agree with those of you who will say that when learning different technologies you will also learn things which are useful no matter the technology you're programming in. But eventually, when the programmer will want to change jobs, will it matter more that he/she knows some WPF, MVC or Sharepoint than the fact that he/she is insanely good at one of them? I would think the second one is more important since most companies are looking for a developer for a certain technology. I don't think there are many companies looking for technical know-it-all people. What do you think?

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• TDD vs. Productivity

  - by Nairou

  In my current project (a game, in C++), I decided that I would use Test Driven Development 100% during development. In terms of code quality, this has been great. My code has never been so well designed or so bug-free. I don't cringe when viewing code I wrote a year ago at the start of the project, and I have gained a much better sense for how to structure things, not only to be more easily testable, but to be simpler to implement and use. However... it has been a year since I started the project. Granted, I can only work on it in my spare time, but TDD is still slowing me down considerably compared to what I'm used to. I read that the slower development speed gets better over time, and I definitely do think up tests a lot more easily than I used to, but I've been at it for a year now and I'm still working at a snail's pace. Each time I think about the next step that needs work, I have to stop every time and think about how I would write a test for it, to allow me to write the actual code. I'll sometimes get stuck for hours, knowing exactly what code I want to write, but not knowing how to break it down finely enough to fully cover it with tests. Other times, I'll quickly think up a dozen tests, and spend an hour writing tests to cover a tiny piece of real code that would have otherwise taken a few minutes to write. Or, after finishing the 50th test to cover a particular entity in the game and all aspects of it's creation and usage, I look at my to-do list and see the next entity to be coded, and cringe in horror at the thought of writing another 50 similar tests to get it implemented. It's gotten to the point that, looking over the progress of the last year, I'm considering abandoning TDD for the sake of "getting the damn project finished". However, giving up the code quality that came with it is not something I'm looking forward to. I'm afraid that if I stop writing tests, then I'll slip out of the habit of making the code so modular and testable. Am I perhaps doing something wrong to still be so slow at this? Are there alternatives that speed up productivity without completely losing the benefits? TAD? Less test coverage? How do other people survive TDD without killing all productivity and motivation?

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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• How to recursive rake? -- or suitable alternatives

  - by TerryP

  I want my projects top level Rakefile to build things using rakefiles deeper in the tree; i.e. the top level rakefile says how to build the project (big picture) and the lower level ones build a specific module (local picture). There is of course a shared set of configuration for the minute details of doing that whenever it can be shared between tasks: so it is mostly about keeping the descriptions of what needs building, as close to the sources being built. E.g. /Source/Module/code.foo and cie should be built using the instructions in /Source/Module/Rakefile; and /Rakefile understands the dependencies between modules. I don't care if it uses multiple rake processes (ala recursive make), or just creates separate build environments. Either way it should be self-containable enough to be processed by a queue: so that non-dependent modules could be built simultaneously. The problem is, how the heck do you actually do something like that with Rake!? I haven't been able to find anything meaningful on the Internet, nor in the documentation. I tried creating a new Rake::Application object and setting it up, but whatever methods I try invoking, only exceptions or "Don't know how to build task ':default'" errors get thrown. (Yes, all rakefiles have a :default). Obviously one could just execute 'rake' in a sub directory for a :modulename task, but that would ditch the options given to the top level; e.g. think of $(MAKE) and $(MAKEFLAGS). Anyone have a clue on how to properly do something like a recursive rake?

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• Remote Task Flow vs. WSRP Portlets

  - by Frank Nimphius

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A remote task flow is bounded task flow that is deployed as a stand-alone Java EE application on a remote server with its URL Invoke property set to url-invoke-allowed. The remote task flow is accessed either from a direct browser GET request or, when called from another ADF application, through the task flow call activity. For more information about how to invoke remote task flows from a task flow call activity see chapter 15.6.4 How to Call a Bounded Task Flow Using a URL of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/b31974/taskflows_activities.htm#CHDJDJEF Compared to WRSP portlets, remote task flows in Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1 and R2 have a functional limitation in that they cannot be embedded as a region on a page but require the calling ADF application to navigate off to another application and page. The difference between a remote task flow call using the task flow call activity and a simple redirect to a remote Java EE application is that the remote task flow has a state token attached that allows to restore the state of the calling application upon task flow return. A use case for a remote task flow call activity is a "yellow page lookup" scenario in which different ADF applications use an remote task flow to lookup people, products or similar to return a selected value to the calling application. Note that remote task flow calls need to be performed from a bounded or unbounded top level task flow of the calling application. If called from a region (using the parent call activity) in a page, the region state is not recovered upon task flow return. ADF developers recently have identified remote task flows as an architecture pattern to partition their ADF applications into independently deployed Java EE applications. While this sounds like a desirable use of the remote task flow feature, it is not possible to achieve for as long as remote task flows don't render as an ADF region.

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• Solo vs Team development and the consequences

  - by Mathieu

  Hi, I've been programming for a while on different languages. I never really studied that at school nor worked on a team of more than 2 (me included). Still, I've been a professional developper for over three years. Last year, I took over my first C# project and it ended up being fine. I can't help but think that because I learned and worked alone I must be missing some concepts/hints/edge. For those who've been solo developpers before being part of a team, can you share your experience? Did you realize you were missing something? Did you find it hard? Did you learn faster after? Thank you!

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