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• Techniques for getting off the ground in any language

  - by AndyBursh

  When I start learning a new language, I have a couple of simple implementations that I like to complete to familiarise myself with the language. Currently, I write: Fibonacci and/or factorial to get the hang of writing and calling methods, and basic recursion Djikstras shortest path (with a node type) to get to grips with making classes (or whatever the language equivalent is) with methods and properties, and also using them in slightly more complex code. I was wondering: does anybody else have any techniques or tools they like to use when getting off the ground in a new language? I'm always looking for new things to add to my "start-up routine".

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• Modelling highly specific business requirements

  - by AndyBursh

  How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

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• Considerations when designing a file type

  - by AndyBursh

  I'm about to start writing a process for saving some data structure from code in to a file of some proprietary, as-yet-undefined type. However, I've never designed a file type or structure before. Are there any things, generally speaking, that I should consider before starting my design? Are there any accepted good practices here? Bad practices I should avoid? Any absolute do's and don'ts? Can anybody recommend any good reading on this topic?

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• Practices for domain models in Javascript (with frameworks)

  - by AndyBursh

  This is a question I've to-and-fro'd with for a while, and searched for and found nothing on: what're the accepted practices surrounding duplicating domain models in Javascript for a web application, when using a framework like Backbone or Knockout? Given a web application of a non-trivial size with a set of domain models on the server side, should we duplicate these models in the web application (see the example at the bottom)? Or should we use the dynamic nature to load these models from the server? To my mind, the arguments for duplicating the models are in easing validation of fields, ensuring that fields that expected to be present are in fact present etc. My approach is to treat the client-side code like an almost separate application, doing trivial things itself and only relying on the server for data and complex operations (which require data the client-side doesn't have). I think treating the client-side code like this is akin to separation between entities from an ORM and the models used with the view in the UI layer: they may have the same fields and relate to the same domain concept, but they're distinct things. On the other hand, it seems to me that duplicating these models on the server side is a clear violation of DRY and likely to lead to differing results on the client- and server-side (where one piece gets updated but the other doesn't). To avoid this violation of DRY we can simply use Javascripts dynamism to get the field names and data from the server as and when they're neeed. So: are there any accepted guidelines around when (and when not) to repeat yourself in these situations? Or this a purely subjective thing, based on the project and developer(s)? Example Server-side model class M { int A DateTime B int C int D = (A*C) double SomeComplexCalculation = ServiceLayer.Call(); } Client-side model function M(){ this.A = ko.observable(); this.B = ko.observable(); this.C = ko.observable(); this.D = function() { return A() * C(); } this.SomeComplexCalculation = ko.observalbe(); return this; }l M.GetComplexValue = function(){ this.SomeComplexCalculation(Ajax.CallBackToServer()); }; I realise this question is quite similar to this one, but I think this is more about almost wholly untying the web application from the server, where that question is about doing this only in the case of complex calculation.

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