Search Results

Search found 14545 results on 582 pages for 'design patterns'.

Page 100/582 | < Previous Page | 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107  | Next Page >

• Configuration data: single-row table vs. name-value-pair table

  - by Heinzi

  Let's say you write an application that can be configured by the user. For storing this "configuration data" into a database, two patterns are commonly used. The single-row table CompanyName | StartFullScreen | RefreshSeconds | ... ---------------+-------------------+------------------+-------- ACME Inc. | true | 20 | ... The name-value-pair table ConfigOption | Value -----------------+------------- CompanyName | ACME Inc. StartFullScreen | true (or 1, or Y, ...) RefreshSeconds | 20 ... | ... I've seen both options in the wild, and both have obvious advantages and disadvantages, for example: The single-row tables limits the number of configuration options you can have (since the number of columns in a row is usually limited). Every additional configuration option requires a DB schema change. In a name-value-pair table everything is "stringly typed" (you have to encode/decode your Boolean/Date/etc. parameters). (many more) Is there some consensus within the development community about which option is preferable?

  Read the article

• How does I/O work for large graph databases?

  - by tjb1982

  I should preface this by saying that I'm mostly a front end web developer, trained as a musician, but over the past few years I've been getting more and more into computer science. So one idea I have as a fun toy project to learn about data structures and C programming was to design and implement my own very simple database that would manage an adjacency list of posts. I don't want SQL (maybe I'll do my own query language? I'm just having fun). It should support ACID. It should be capable of storing 1TB let's say. So with that, I was trying to think of how a database even stores data, without regard to data structures necessarily. I'm working on linux, and I've read that in that world "everything is a file," including hardware (like /dev/*), so I think that that obviously has to apply to a database, too, and it clearly does--whether it's MySQL or PostgreSQL or Neo4j, the database itself is a collection of files you can see in the filesystem. That said, there would come a point in scale where loading the entire database into primary memory just wouldn't work, so it doesn't make sense to design it with that mindset (I assume). However, reading from secondary memory would be much slower and regardless some portion of the database has to be in primary memory in order for you to be able to do anything with it. I read this post: Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk? And I found it difficult to understand how other databases, like SQLite or Neo4j, read and write from secondary memory and are still very fast (faster, it would seem, than simply writing files to the filesystem as the above question suggests). It seems the key is indexing. But even indexes need to be stored in secondary memory. They are inherently smaller than the database itself, but indexes in a very large database might be prohibitively large, too. So my question is how is I/O generally done with large databases like the one I described above that would be at least 1TB storing a big adjacency list? If indexing is more or less the answer, how exactly does indexing work--what data structures should be involved?

  Read the article

• Procedural world generation oriented on gameplay features

  - by Richard Fabian

  In large procedural landscape games, the land seems dull, but that's probably because the real world is largely dull, with only limited places where the scenery is dramatic or tactical. Looking at world generation from this point of view, a landscape generator for a game needs to not follow the rules of landscaping, but instead some rules married to the expectations of the gamer. For example, there could be a choke point / route generator that creates hills ravines, rivers and mountains between cities, rather than cities plotted on the land based on the resources or conditions generated by the mountains and rainfall patterns. Is there any existing work being done like this? Start with cities or population centres and then add in terrain afterwards?

  Read the article

• Is pixelmator a viable alternative for photoshop? [migrated]

  - by ChrisR

  I've always been a photoshop user, i know the ins and outs and know my way around all the tools i need for my webdesign work. But now i'm faced with a dilemma, for my new job i haven't got the budget for a full photoshop license so i'm wondering, is pixelmator a good alternative? I use Photoshop mainly to slice a design into separate images so enable/disable layers is a must, PSD compatibility too, ... Anyone has experience with Pixelmator?

  Read the article

• What is a Non-Functional Requirement?

  - by atconway

  In my breakdown of work I have to define work against 'Functional' and 'Non-Functional' design elements / work in my applications. I read the description from Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-functional_requirement but as typical the description did not speak exactly to me to clear up my understanding. Can someone please explain in terms of an example when creating an application from scratch, what would be defined as a 'Non-Functional' requirement?

  Read the article

• Advantages and disadvantages of building a single page web application

  - by ryanzec

  I'm nearing the end of a prototyping/proof of concept phase for a side project I'm working on, and trying to decide on some larger scale application design decisions. The app is a project management system tailored more towards the agile development process. One of the decisions I need to make is whether or not to go with a traditional multi-page application or a single page application. Currently my prototype is a traditional multi-page setup, however I have been looking at backbone.js to clean up and apply some structure to my Javascript (jQuery) code. It seems like while backbone.js can be used in multi-page applications, it shines more with single page applications. I am trying to come up with a list of advantages and disadvantages of using a single page application design approach. So far I have: Advantages All data has to be available via some sort of API - this is a big advantage for my use case as I want to have an API to my application anyway. Right now about 60-70% of my calls to get/update data are done through a REST API. Doing a single page application will allow me to better test my REST API since the application itself will use it. It also means that as the application grows, the API itself will grow since that is what the application uses; no need to maintain the API as an add-on to the application. More responsive application - since all data loaded after the initial page is kept to a minimum and transmitted in a compact format (like JSON), data requests should generally be faster, and the server will do slightly less processing. Disadvantages Duplication of code - for example, model code. I am going to have to create models both on the server side (PHP in this case) and the client side in Javascript. Business logic in Javascript - I can't give any concrete examples on why this would be bad but it just doesn't feel right to me having business logic in Javascript that anyone can read. Javascript memory leaks - since the page never reloads, Javascript memory leaks can happen, and I would not even know where to begin to debug them. There are also other things that are kind of double edged swords. For example, with single page applications, the data processed for each request can be a lot less since the application will be asking for the minimum data it needs for the particular request, however it also means that there could be a lot more small request to the server. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of single page web applications that I should keep in mind when deciding which way I should go for my project?

  Read the article

• Taking Object Oriented development to the next level

  - by Songo

  Can you mention some advanced OO topics or concepts that one should be aware of? I have been a developer for 2 years now and currently aiming for a certain company that requires a web developer with a minimum experience of 3 years. I imagine the interview will have the basic object oriented topics like (Abstraction, Polymorphism, Inheritance, Design patterns, UML, Databases and ORMs, SOLID principles, DRY principle, ...etc) I have these topics covered, but what I'm looking forward to is bringing up topics such as Efferent Coupling, Afferent Coupling, Instability, The law of Demeter, ...etc. Till few days ago I never knew such concepts existed (maybe because I'm a communication engineer basically not a CS graduate.) Can you please recommend some more advanced topics concerning object oriented programming?

  Read the article

• What advantages do we have when creating a separate mapping table for two relational tables

  - by Pankaj Upadhyay

  In various open source CMS, I have noticed that there is a separate table for mapping two relational tables. Like for categories and products, there is a separate product_category_mapping table. This table just has a primary key and two foreign keys from the categories and product tables. My question is what are the benefits of this database design rather than just linking the tables directly by defining a foreign key in either table? Is it just matter of convenience?

  Read the article

• OOD: All classes at bottom of hierarchy contain the same field

  - by My Head Hurts

  I am creating a class diagram for what I thought was a fairly simple problem. However, when I get to the bottom of the hierarchy, all of the classes only contain one field and it is the same one. This to me looks very wrong, but this field does not belong in any of the parent classes. I was wondering if there are any suggested design patterns in a situation like this? A simplified version of the class diagram can be found below. Note, fields named differently cannot belong to any other class +------------------+ | ObjectA | |------------------| | String one | | String two | | | +---------+--------+ | +---------------+----------------+ | | +--------|--------+ +--------|--------+ | ObjectAA | | ObjectAB | |-----------------| |-----------------| | String three | | String four | | | | | +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+ | | | | +--------|--------+ +--------|--------+ | ObjectAAA | | ObjectABA | |-----------------| |-----------------| | String five | | String five | | | | | +-----------------+ +-----------------+ ASCII tables drawn using http://www.asciiflow.com/

  Read the article

• Single Responsibility Principle Implementation

  - by Mike S

  In my spare time, I've been designing a CMS in order to learn more about actual software design and architecture, etc. Going through the SOLID principles, I already notice that ideas like "MVC", "DRY", and "KISS", pretty much fall right into place. That said, I'm still having problems deciding if one of two implementations is the best choice when it comes to the Single Responsibility Principle. Implementation #1: class User getName getPassword getEmail // etc... class UserManager create read update delete class Session start stop class Login main class Logout main class Register main The idea behind this implementation is that all user-based actions are separated out into different classes (creating a possible case of the aptly-named Ravioli Code), but following the SRP to a "tee", almost literally. But then I thought that it was a bit much, and came up with this next implementation class UserView extends View getLogin //Returns the html for the login screen getShortLogin //Returns the html for an inline login bar getLogout //Returns the html for a logout button getRegister //Returns the html for a register page // etc... as needed class UserModel extends DataModel implements IDataModel // Implements no new methods yet, outside of the interface methods // Haven't figured out anything special to go here at the moment // All CRUD operations are handled by DataModel // through methods implemented by the interface class UserControl extends Control implements IControl login logout register startSession stopSession class User extends DataObject getName getPassword getEmail // etc... This is obviously still very organized, and still very "single responsibility". The User class is a data object that I can manipulate data on and then pass to the UserModel to save it to the database. All the user data rendering (what the user will see) is handled by UserView and it's methods, and all the user actions are in one space in UserControl (plus some automated stuff required by the CMS to keep a user logged in or to ensure that they stay out.) I personally can't think of anything wrong with this implementation either. In my personal feelings I feel that both are effectively correct, but I can't decide which one would be easier to maintain and extend as life goes on (despite leaning towards Implementation #1.) So what about you guys? What are your opinions on this? Which one is better? What basics (or otherwise, nuances) of that principle have I missed in either design?

  Read the article

• Designing complex query builders in java/jpa/hibernate

  - by Ramraj Edagutti

  I need to build complex sql queries programatically, based on large filter conditions. For example, below are few sample/hypothitical filter conditions, based on which i need to fetch users Country: india States: Andhra Pradesh(AP), Gujarat(GUJ), karnataka(KTK) Districts: All districts in AP except 3 district, 5 any districts from GUJ, all district from KTK except 1 district Cities: All cities in AP, all cities except few, include only 50 specific cities from KTK Villages: similar conditions like above with varies combinations... Currently, we have a query builder, which is very complex in nature, and not easy to modify/re-factory for improvements. So, thinking of complete re-design of it. Any suggesations on how to build this kind of complex query builders programmatically using some best practices/deisgn patterns?

  Read the article

• How can I solve the same problems a CB-architecture is trying to solve without using hacks? [on hold]

  - by Jefffrey

  A component based system's goal is to solve the problems that derives from inheritance: for example the fact that some parts of the code (that are called components) are reused by very different classes that, hypothetically, would lie in a very different branch of the inheritance tree. That's a very nice concept, but I've found out that CBS is often hard to accomplish without using ugly hacks. Implementations of this system are often far from clean. But I don't want to discuss this any further. My question is: how can I solve the same problems a CBS try to solve with a very clean interface? (possibly with examples, there are a lot of abstract talks about the "perfect" design already). Here's an example I was going for before realizing I was just reinventing inheritance again: class Human { public: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other human specific components }; class Zombie { Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other zombie specific components }; After writing that I realized I needed an interface, otherwise I would have needed N containers for N different types of objects (or to use boost::variant to gather them all together). So I've thought of polymorphism (move what systems do in a CBS design into class specific functions): class Entity { public: virtual void on_event(Event) {} // not pure virtual on purpose virtual void on_update(World) {} virtual void on_draw(Window) {} }; class Human { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; class Zombie { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; Which was nice, except for the fact that now the outside world would not even be able to know where a Human is positioned (it does not have access to its position member). That would be useful to track the player position for collision detection or if on_update the Zombie would want to track down its nearest human to move towards him. So I added const Position& get_position() const; to both the Zombie and Human classes. And then I realized that both functionality were shared, so it should have gone to the common base class: Entity. Do you notice anything? Yes, with that methodology I would have a god Entity class full of common functionality (which is the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place).

  Read the article

• How did you get good practices for your OOP designs?

  - by Darf Zon

  I realized I have a difficulty creating OOP designs. I spent many time deciding if this property is correctly set it to X class. For example, this is a post which has a few days: http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/8041/how-to-improve-my-factory-design I'm not convinced of my code. So I want to improve my designs, take less time creating it. How did you learn creating good designs? Some books that you can recommend me?

  Read the article

• Designing Videogame Character Parodies [duplicate]

  - by David Dimalanta

  This question already has an answer here: Is it legal to add a cameo appearance of a known video game character in my game? 2 answers Was it okay to make a playable character when making a videogame despite its resemblance? For example, I'm making a 3rd-person action-platform genre and I have to make a character design resembling like Megaman but not exactly the same as him since there is little alternate in color, details, and facial features.

  Read the article

• What's the problem with Scala's XML literals?

  - by Oak

  In this post, Martin (the language's head honcho) writes: [XML literals] Seemed a great idea at the time, now it sticks out like a sore thumb. I believe with the new string interpolation scheme we will be able to put all of XML processing in the libraries, which should be a big win. Being interested in language design myself, I'm wondering: Why does he write that it was a mistake to incorporate XML literals into the language? What is the controversy regarding this feature?

  Read the article

• Started wrong with a project. Should I start over?

  - by solidsnake

  I'm a beginner web developer (one year of experience). A couple of weeks after graduating, I got offered a job to build a web application for a company whose owner is not much of a tech guy. He recruited me to avoid theft of his idea, the high cost of development charged by a service company, and to have someone young he can trust onboard to maintain the project for the long run (I came to these conclusions by myself long after being hired). Cocky as I was back then, with a diploma in computer science, I accepted the offer thinking I can build anything. I was calling the shots. After some research I settled on PHP, and started with plain PHP, no objects, just ugly procedural code. Two months later, everything was getting messy, and it was hard to make any progress. The web application is huge. So I decided to check out an MVC framework that would make my life easier. That's where I stumbled upon the cool kid in the PHP community: Laravel. I loved it, it was easy to learn, and I started coding right away. My code looked cleaner, more organized. It looked very good. But again the web application was huge. The company was pressuring me to deliver the first version, which they wanted to deploy, obviously, and start seeking customers. Because Laravel was fun to work with, it made me remember why I chose this industry in the first place - something I forgot while stuck in the shitty education system. So I started working on small projects at night, reading about methodologies and best practice. I revisited OOP, moved on to object-oriented design and analysis, and read Uncle Bob's book Clean Code. This helped me realize that I really knew nothing. I did not know how to build software THE RIGHT WAY. But at this point it was too late, and now I'm almost done. My code is not clean at all, just spaghetti code, a real pain to fix a bug, all the logic is in the controllers, and there is little object oriented design. I'm having this persistent thought that I have to rewrite the whole project. However, I can't do it... They keep asking when is it going to be all done. I can not imagine this code deployed on a server. Plus I still know nothing about code efficiency and the web application's performance. On one hand, the company is waiting for the product and can not wait anymore. On the other hand I can't see myself going any further with the actual code. I could finish up, wrap it up and deploy, but god only knows what might happen when people start using it. What do you think I should do?

  Read the article

• "UML is the worst thing to ever happen to MDD." Why?

  - by Florents

  William Cook in a tweet wrote that: "UML is the worst thing to ever happen to MDD. Fortunately many people now realize this ..." I would like to know the reasoning behind that claim (apparently, I'm not referring to his personal opinion). I've noticed that many people out there don't like UML that much. Also it is worth mentioning that he is in academia, where UML is preety much the holy grail of effective design and modelling.

  Read the article

• Should I use JavaFx properties?

  - by Mike G

  I'm usually very careful to keep my Model, View, and Controller code separate. The thing is JavaFx properties are so convenient to bind them all together. The issue is that it makes my entire code design dependent on JavaFx, which I feel I should not being doing. I should be able to change the view without changing too much of the model and controller. So should I ignore the convenience of JavaFx properties, or should I embrace them and the fact that it reduces my codes flexibility.

  Read the article

• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

  Read the article

• What are the essential things one needs to know about UML?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  I want my scribbles of a program's design and behaviour to become more streamlined and have a common language with other developers. I looked at UML and in principle it seems to be what I'm looking for, but it seems to be overkill. The information I found online also seems very bloated and academic. How can I understand UML in plain-English way, enough to be able to explain it to my colleagues? What are the canonical resources for understanding UML at a ground level?

  Read the article

• What's the most useful 10% of UML and is there a quick tutorial on it?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  I want my scribbles of a program's design and behaviour to become more streamlined and have a common language with other developers. I looked at UML and in principle it seems to be what I'm looking for, just way overkill. The information I found online also seems very bloated and academic. Is there a no-bullshit, 15-minutes introduction to the handful of UML symbols I'll need when discussing the architecture of some garden variety software on a whiteboard with my colleagues?

  Read the article

• Starting all over again?

  - by kyndigs

  Have you ever been developing something and just came to a point where you think that this is rubbish, the design is bad and although I will lose time it will be better to just start all over again? What should you consider before making this step? I know it can be drastic in some cases, is it best to just totally ignore what you did before, or take some of the best bits from it? Some real life examples would be great.

  Read the article

• How many tiers should my models have in a DB driven web app?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  In my experience, the "Model" in MVC is often not really a single layer. I would regularly have "backend" models and "frontend" models, where the backend ones would have properties that I want to hide from the UI code, and the frontend ones have derived or composite properties which are more meaningful in the context of the UI. Recently, I have started to introduce a third layer in between when database normalization created tables that did not really match the conceptual domain objects anymore. In those projects I have model classes that are equivalent with the DB structure, these become components of objects that represent the domain model, and finally these are filtered and amended for displaying information to the user. Are there patterns or guidelines for how, when and why to organize the data model across application layers?

  Read the article

• Should I use multiple column primary keys or add a new colum?

  - by Covar

  My current database design makes use of a multiple column primary key to use existing data (that would be unique anyway) instead of creating an additional column assigning each entry an arbitrary key. I know that this is allowed, but was wondering if this is a practice that I might want to use cautiously and possibly avoid (much like goto in C). So what are some of the disadvantages I might see in this approach or reasons I might want a single column key?

  Read the article

• What is the term that means "keeping the arguments for different API calls as similar as possible"?

  - by larson4

  There is a word which I can never remember... it expresses a design goal that API calls (or functions or methods or whatever) should be as similar as reasonably possible in their argument patterns. It may also extend to naming as well. In other words, all other things being equal, it is probably bad to have these three functions: deleteUser(email) petRemove(petId,species) destroyPlanet(planetName,starName) if instead you could have deleteUser(userId) deletePet(petId) deletePlanet(planetId) What is the word for this concept? I keep thinking it's "orthogonal" but it definitely isn't. Its a very important concept, and to me it's one of the biggest things that makes some APIs a joy to work with (because once you learn a few things you can pretty much use everything without looking at doco), and others a pain (because every function is done inconsistently).

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107  | Next Page >