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• Three Master Data Management Deployment Tips

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  MDM is all about data quality and data governance. We now know that improved data quality raises all operational and analytical boats. But it's not just about deploying data quality tools. It's about deploying data quality tools within and across the IT landscape - from a thousand points of data entry to a single version of the truth. Here are three tips to deploying MDM across your applications and enterprise.   #1: Identify a tactical, high-value business problem where MDM can materially help. §  Support a customer acquisition and retention program with a 'customer' master data solution. §  Accelerate new products and services to market with a 'product' master data solution. §  Reduce supplier exceptions or support spend control initiatives with a 'supplier' master data solution. §  Support new store (branch, campus, restaurant, hospital, office, well head) location analysis with a 'site' master data solution. §  Fix long standing Chart of Accounts and Cost Center problems with a 'financial' master data solution. §  Support M&A activity, application upgrades, an SOA initiative, a cloud computing program, or a new business intelligence deployment by implementing a mix of master data solutions.   #2: Incrementally expand to a full information architecture. Quite often, the measurable return on interest from tactical MDM initiatives will fund future deployments. Over time, the MDM solution expands into its full architecture to cover the entire IT landscape. Operations and analytics are united, IT flexibility is restored, and sustainable competitive advantage is achieved.   #3: Bring business into every MDM deployment. To be successful, MDM must work hand in hand with data governance. In fact, Oracle MDM incorporates data governance tools for business users. IT can insure data quality, but only after the business side has defined what quality means. The business establishes the rules for governing the master data, and then IT enforces the rules via the MDM applications. Without this business/IT collaboration, MDM initiatives seldom achieve their full potential.   It is not very often that a technology comes along that can measurably assist organizations across a wide variety of top IT initiatives. Reducing costs, increasing flexibility, getting more out of existing assets, and aligning business and IT are not easy tasks for any CIO. But with MDM, success is achievable. IT can regain its place as a center for innovation.   For more information on this topic, take a look at my article Master Data Management Deployment Tips in the Opinion Section of Oracle's Profit Online magazine.

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• Using ASP.NET Membership Provider with an ACL

  - by geekrutherford

  Up until recently one of my applications has used the membership provider within ASP.NET exclusively. However, it has been proposed that while the currently defined roles are beneficial, security needs to be more granular to restrict both access to certain pages and functionality present within a given page.   Unfortunately, the role based security ASP.NET gives you out of the box falls down in this area. This is not due to a lack of foresight by Microsoft, but rather it was simply not designed for implementing both role based security and any inherent ACL you may define within these roles. Mind you some would say an ACL is independent of the role to which a user belongs and is assigned to the user directly.   The application mentioned here has it's own User object (which encapsulates the membership provider user object as a property) and SQL Server table to store extended information not present in the aspnet_users table. While I could have modified the aspnet membership schema to suit the applications needs, it seemed smarter to simply create a separate table with a foreign key back to the aspnet_users table.   Since I have a separate object to store extended user information, I simply created an ACL object and expose it as a property of my user object.   This is all well and good, but it does not help in regards to the SiteMapProvider and restricting access at the page level based on the users ACL.   The straightforward answer would be to develop some code within the databound event for the menu that checks the page title and has hardcoded logic that dictates a user must have certain permissions turned on. The problem with this approach is that it's HARDCODED!!! If you need to change access to a page you'd need to do a build and go through your normal deployment process....ugh!!!   An alternative method, albeit not perfect, is to utilize the resourceKey property on the SiteMapNodes in the SiteMap file with the name of the required permission to view the page. Within the databound event for your menu you iterate the SiteMapNodes in the menus SiteMapProvider looking for a match at the page level based on title. When a match is detected, you have a switch/case on the SiteMapNodes resourceKey (the name of the ACL permission required). The case for the resourceKey ensures the users ACL permission is turned on and viola!!!   This is noteably not perfect in that it is using the resourceKey in a manner other than intended.  Since the application is not localized, using it in the manner described it not an issue.   Below is a sample SiteMap file with the resourceKey used as the ACL permission identifier:     Below is the ItemDataBound event. This application uses the Telerik Menu control:

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• Is it evil to model JSON responses to classes when they are mostly smilar?

  - by Aybe

  Here's the problem : While implementing a C# wrapper for an online API (Discogs) I've been faced to a dilemma : quite often the responses returned have mostly similar members and while modeling these responses to classes, some questions surfaces on which way to go would be the best. Example : Querying for a 'release' or a 'master' will return an object that contains an array of 'artist', however these 'artists' do not exactly have the same members. Currently I decided to represent these 'artists' as a single 'Artist' class, against having respective 'ReleaseArtist' and 'MasterArtist' classes which soon becomes very confusing even though another problem arises : when a category (master or release) does not return these members, they will be null. Though it might sound confusing as well I find it less confusing than the former situation as I've tackled the problem by simply not showing null members when visualizing these objects. Is this the right approach to follow ? An example of these differences : public class Artist { public List<Alias> Aliases { get; set; } public string DataQuality { get; set; } public List<Image> Images { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public List<string> NameVariations { get; set; } public string Profile { get; set; } public string Realname { get; set; } public string ReleasesUrl { get; set; } public string ResourceUrl { get; set; } public string Uri { get; set; } public List<string> Urls { get; set; } } public class ReleaseArtist { public string Join { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Anv { get; set; } public string Tracks { get; set; } public string Role { get; set; } public string ResourceUrl { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } }

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• Software Architecture and MEF composition location

  - by Leonardo

  Introduction My software (a bunch of webapi's) consist of 4 projects: Core, FrontWebApi, Library and Administration. Library is a code library project that consists of only interfaces and enumerators. All my classes in other projects inherit from at least one interface, and this interface is in the library. Generally speaking, my interfaces define either Entities, Repositories or Controllers. This project references no other project or any special dlls... just the regular .Net stuff... Core is a class-library project where concrete implementation of Entities and Repositories. In some cases i have more than 1 implementation for a Repository (ex: one for azure table storage and one for regular Sql). This project handles the intelligence (business rules mostly) and persistence, and it references only the Library. FrontWebApi is a ASP.NET MVC 4 WebApi project that implements the controllers interfaces to handle web-requests (from a mobile native app)... It references the Core and the Library. Administration is a code-library project that represents a "optional-module", meaning: if it is present, it provides extra-features (such as Access Control Lists) to the application, but if its not, no problem. Administration is also only referencing the Library and implementing concrete classes of a few interfaces such as "IAccessControlEntry"... I intend to make this available with a "setup" that will create any required database table or anything like that. But it is important to notice that the Core has no reference to this project... Development Now, in order to have a decoupled code I decide to use IoC and because this is a small project, I decided to do it using MEF, specially because of its advertised "composition" capabilities. I arranged all the imports/exports and constructors and everything, but something is quite not perfect in my "mental-visualisation": Main Question Where should I "Compose" the objects? I mean: Technically, the only place where real implementation access is required is in the Repositories, because in order to retrieve data from wherever, entities instances will be necessary, and in all other places. The repositories could also provide a public "GetCleanInstanceOf()" right? Then all other places will be just fine working with the interfaces instead of concrete classes... Secondary Question Should "Administration" implement the concrete object for "IAccessControlGeneralRepository" or the Core should?

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• gstreamer pulseaudio echo cancellation

  - by user3618055

  I'm implementing a voip application using gstreamer, i use the example of the rtp in the plugin-good! i want to implement echo cancellation, i couldn't use the speex echo canceller with gstreamer because the input and the output are not in the same process. So, i want to use pulse audio to make echo cancellation? can any one help me how to deal with? the sender voice is pipeline = gst_pipeline_new (NULL); g_assert (pipeline); /* the audio capture and format conversion */ audiosrc = gst_element_factory_make (pulsesrc, "audiosrc"); g_assert (audiosrc); audioconv = gst_element_factory_make ("audioconvert", "audioconv"); g_assert (audioconv); audiores = gst_element_factory_make ("audioresample", "audiores"); g_assert (audiores); /* the encoding and payloading */ audioenc = gst_element_factory_make (AUDIO_ENC, "audioenc"); g_assert (audioenc); audiopay = gst_element_factory_make (AUDIO_PAY, "audiopay"); g_assert (audiopay); /* add capture and payloading to the pipeline and link */ gst_bin_add_many (GST_BIN (pipeline), audiosrc, audioconv, audiores, audioenc, audiopay, NULL); if (!gst_element_link_many (audiosrc, audioconv, audiores, audioenc, audiopay, NULL)) { g_error ("Failed to link audiosrc, audioconv, audioresample, " "audio encoder and audio payloader"); } and the receiver is : gst_bin_add_many (GST_BIN (pipeline), rtpsrc, rtcpsrc, rtcpsink, NULL); /* the depayloading and decoding */ audiodepay = gst_element_factory_make (AUDIO_DEPAY, "audiodepay"); g_assert (audiodepay); audiodec = gst_element_factory_make (AUDIO_DEC, "audiodec"); g_assert (audiodec); /* the audio playback and format conversion */ audioconv = gst_element_factory_make ("audioconvert", "audioconv"); g_assert (audioconv); audiores = gst_element_factory_make ("audioresample", "audiores"); g_assert (audiores); audiosink = gst_element_factory_make (pulsesink, "audiosink"); g_assert (audiosink); /* add depayloading and playback to the pipeline and link */ gst_bin_add_many (GST_BIN (pipeline), audiodepay, audiodec, audioconv, audiores, audiosink, NULL); res = gst_element_link_many (audiodepay, audiodec, audioconv, audiores, audiosink, NULL); g_assert (res == TRUE); i tried to change gstreamer proprietes to pulseaudio server in input and output and i used "pactl load-module module-echo-cancel aec_method=adrian" but i still listen to echo!! any one could help please thanks!!

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• mongoDB Management Studio

  - by Liam McLennan

  This weekend I have been in Sydney at the MS Web Camp, learning about web application development. At the end of the first day we came up with application ideas and pitched them. My idea was to build a web management application for mongoDB. mongoDB I pitched my idea, put down the microphone, and then someone asked, “what’s mongo?”. Good question. MongoDB is a document database that stores JSON style documents. This is a JSON document for a tweet from twitter: db.tweets.find()[0] { "_id" : ObjectId("4bfe4946cfbfb01420000001"), "created_at" : "Thu, 27 May 2010 10:25:46 +0000", "profile_image_url" : "http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/600304197/Snapshot_2009-07-26_13-12-43_normal.jpg", "from_user" : "drearyclocks", "text" : "Does anyone know who has better coverage, Optus or Vodafone? Telstra is still too expensive.", "to_user_id" : null, "metadata" : { "result_type" : "recent" }, "id" : { "floatApprox" : 14825648892 }, "geo" : null, "from_user_id" : 6825770, "search_term" : "telstra", "iso_language_code" : "en", "source" : "&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tweetdeck.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TweetDeck&lt;/a&gt;" } A mongodb server can have many databases, each database has many collections (instead of tables) and a collection has many documents (instead of rows). Development Day 2 of the Sydney MS Web Camp was allocated to building our applications. First thing in the morning I identified the stories that I wanted to implement: Scenario: View databases Scenario: View Collections in a database Scenario: View Documents in a Collection Scenario: Delete a Collection Scenario: Delete a Database Scenario: Delete Documents Over the course of the day the team (3.5 developers) implemented all of the planned stories (except ‘delete a database’) and also implemented the following: Scenario: Create Database Scenario: Create Collection Lessons Learned I’m new to MongoDB and in the past I have only accessed it from Ruby (for my hare-brained scheme). When it came to implementing our MongoDB management studio we discovered that their is no official MongoDB driver for .NET. We chose to use NoRM, honestly just because it was the only one I had heard of. NoRM was a challenge. I think it is a fine library but it is focused on mapping strongly typed objects to MongoDB. For our application we had no prior knowledge of the types that would be in the MongoDB database so NoRM was probably a poor choice. Here are some screens (click to enlarge):

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• Oracle HCM Cloud Customer Q&A with WAXIE Sanitary Supply

  - by HCM-Oracle

  At this year’s Oracle HCM User Group (OHUG) Global conference, we had the opportunity to sit down with Oracle HCM Cloud customers for a short Q&A. We got to hear about what brought them to the OHUG conference, some of the benefits they are receiving from their Oracle HCM Cloud solutions, and advice they would give other businesses looking to move to the cloud.  Below is a discussion we had with Melissa Halverson, Benefits & HRIS Manager at WAXIE Sanitary Supply.  Q: What made you attend the OHUG Global Conference this year? Halverson: The biggest reason is networking. It allows me to connect with others in the Oracle HCM Cloud community. I was able to speak at the HCM Cloud SIG (Special Interest Group) on the first day and share my experiences as well as hear the experiences of other Oracle HCM Cloud users. It also allows me to get face-time with key people within Oracle.  Q: What Oracle HCM solutions are you currently using? Halverson: Global HR, Benefits, Workforce Compensation, and Performance Management. Q: Do you plan to invest further in Oracle HCM? Halverson: Yes, we are interested in Time and Labor. We would also like to get Recruiting at some point in the future. Q: What would you say is the most significant benefit you’ve realized from your use of Oracle HCM solutions? Halverson: First and foremost would be process improvement. Before we had Oracle HCM Cloud we relied on a paper process where something as simple as an employee address change required changes to be made manually in 9 different systems. Obviously that was extremely inefficient, but also increased the likelihood of errors being made.  The other huge benefit we have seen was in making information visible to the people that need it. Prior to implementing Oracle HCM Cloud, it was very difficult for anyone to access and make use of the information in our systems. Now, we can provide this information to those who need it to make better decisions.  Q: What advice would you give an organization looking to move their HR systems to the cloud? Halverson: One thing I think many organizations don't spend enough time doing is thoroughly vetting their implementation partner. I believe you should be vetting your implementation partner as much as you did the system itself. Also, manpower is so important. Involve as large a team as possible because you don’t want to get stuck having too few bodies to help out. And set realistic time frames. Biting off more than you can chew will inevitably result in failure. Having a phased approach is always best rather than trying to do everything at once. Thanks for the tips Melissa. Enjoy the rest of the conference!

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• Two interfaces with identical signatures

  - by corsiKa

  I am attempting to model a card game where cards have two important sets of features: The first is an effect. These are the changes to the game state that happen when you play the card. The interface for effect is as follows: boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs); void play(Player p, GameState gs); And you could consider the card to be playable if and only if you can meet its cost and all its effects are playable. Like so: // in Card class boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs) { if(p.resource < this.cost) return false; for(Effect e : this.effects) { if(!e.isPlayable(p,gs)) return false; } return true; } Okay, so far, pretty simple. The other set of features on the card are abilities. These abilities are changes to the game state that you can activate at-will. When coming up with the interface for these, I realized they needed a method for determining whether they can be activated or not, and a method for implementing the activation. It ends up being boolean isActivatable(Player p, GameState gs); void activate(Player p, GameState gs); And I realize that with the exception of calling it "activate" instead of "play", Ability and Effect have the exact same signature. Is it a bad thing to have multiple interfaces with an identical signature? Should I simply use one, and have two sets of the same interface? As so: Set<Effect> effects; Set<Effect> abilities; If so, what refactoring steps should I take down the road if they become non-identical (as more features are released), particularly if they're divergent (i.e. they both gain something the other shouldn't, as opposed to only one gaining and the other being a complete subset)? I'm particularly concerned that combining them will be non-sustainable as soon as something changes. The fine print: I recognize this question is spawned by game development, but I feel it's the sort of problem that could just as easily creep up in non-game development, particularly when trying to accommodate the business models of multiple clients in one application as happens with just about every project I've ever done with more than one business influence... Also, the snippets used are Java snippets, but this could just as easily apply to a multitude of object oriented languages.

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• Base Pages and Interfaces for ASP.NET Pages

  - by geekrutherford

  For quite a while I have been using the concept of base pages when developing pages in ASP.NET applications. It is a wonderful method for exposing common functions to all of your applications pages and also overriding certain events for various purposes (i.e. dynamic themes).  Recently I found out a new developer will be joining my team. This prompted me to review the applications code for readability and ease of maintenance. I began adding comments through out the code behind for all pages within the application. While doing so I noted that I had used common method names for such things as loading data, configuring controls, applying filters, etc.   Bringing a new developer on board, I wanted to make the transition as seamless as possible while also ensuring they follow existing coding practices we already have in place. While I could have created virtual methods for the common page methods allowing them to overridden, what I really needed was a way to ensure the new developer implemented the same methods for each and every page. Thus I created an interface to force the issue.   Now, every page not only inherits the base page class but also implements an interface. This provides every page not only common functions and overridden page events but also imposes rules for implementing certain common methods :-)   Interface   public interface BasePageInterface { /// Configures page based on users security permissions. void CheckPermissions(); /// Configures Filter Form control for current page.  /// Ensure you have set the FilteredGrid and PageAjaxManager properties of the FilterForm control in PageLoad!!!  void ConfigureFilters(); /// Sets event handlers and default settings for controls on the current page. void ConfigureControls(); /// Exports data bound to grid in selected format. void ExportGridData(ExportFormat fmt); /// Loads data and binds to grid. /// Columns are turned on/off in grid depending on tab selected and users permissions.  void LoadData(); }   Page code-behind class definition:   public partial class MyPage : BasePage, BasePageInterface Note, you could not use an abstract class to accomplish this considering C# does not allow for multiple inheritance.  Nor could the base page class be abstract since it needs to inherit from the System.Web.UI.Page class in order to override page events.

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• How to deal with malicious domain redirections?

  - by user359650

  It is possible for anybody to buy a domain name containing negative terms and point it to someone's website in order to damage their reputation. For instance someone could buy the domain child-pornography.com and point it to the address 64.34.119.12 which is the address behind stackoverflow.com and people navigating to the domain in question would end up visualizing content from StackExchange which would be detrimental to StackExchange's image. To illustrate this, I added the entry 64.34.119.12 child-pornography.com to my /etc/hosts file and tested. Here is what I obtained: I personally found this user experience terrible as someone could think that Stack Exchange are in favor of child pornography and awaiting support from the community to create a Q&A site about it. I tested with other websites and experienced other behaviors that I would categorize as follows: 1 - Useful 404 page (happens with stackoverflow.com): For me the worst way of handling this as the image of the targeted website is directly associated with the offending domain. The more useful the 404 page, the bigger the impression that the targeted website would be willing to help with child pornography. 2 - Redirection (happens with microsoft.com): For instance when accessing child-pornography.com you get redirected to www.microsoft.com. It isn't as bad as above as the offending domain name never appears alongside the targeted website's content, but still bad in my opinion as it gives the impression the targeted website bought the offending domain and redirected it to their website to get more traffic. 3 - Server error (happens with lemonde.fr): You get an error from the webserver which page doesn't contain any content that can be associated with the targeted website (e.g. default Apache 404 page, completely blank page). I believe that is good as the identify of the targeted website isn't revealed. Above are the various behaviors I experienced, but I also thought about a fourth way of dealing with this which is described below. 4 - Disclaimer page (haven't found any website implementing that technique): Display a message such as : "You ended here because someone bought and linked the child-pornography.com domain to our website. We do not own this domain and do not associate ourselves with it. This request has been logged by our servers and we will raise this issue with the competent authorities to have this domain taken down. If you want to access our website, please click here." The good thing about this method is that it can be implemented at application layer (good if you don't have control over web server which happens with some hosting solutions), allows you to protect yourself from any liability, and offer the visitor to be redirected to your own website. Which of the above options would you implement to deal with malicious domain linking (IMO only options 3 and 4 are worth considering) ?

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• Manic Monday - More OpenWorld Solaris Sessions: Developers, Cloud, Customer Insights, Hardware Optimization

  - by Larry Wake

  We're overflowing with Monday sessions; literally more than one person can take in. Learn more about what's new in Oracle Solaris Studio, hear about the latest x86 and SPARC hardware optimizations, get some insights on cloud deployment strategies, and find out from your peers what they're doing with Oracle Solaris. If you're an OpenWorld attendee, go to to Schedule Builder to guarantee your space in any session or lab. See yesterday's blog post and the "Focus on Oracle Solaris" guide for even more sessions. Monday, October 1st: 10:45 AM - Maximizing Your SPARC T4 Oracle Solaris Application Performance(CON6382,  Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3) Hear how customers and commercial software partners have reached peak performance on SPARC T4 servers and engineered systems with Oracle Solaris Studio and its latest tools for analyzing, reporting, and improving runtime performance: Autoparallelizing, high-performance compilers Performance Analyzer (used to find performance hotspots) Thread Analyzer (to expose data races and deadlocks) Code Analyzer (used to discover latent memory corruption issues) 10:45 Cloud Formation: Implementing IaaS in Practice with Oracle Solaris(CON8787, Moscone South 302) Decisions, decisions--at the same time, we've got a session that covers why Oracle Solaris is the ideal OS for public or private clouds, IaaS or PaaS, with built-in features for elastic infrastructure, unrivaled security, superfast installation and deployment, nonstop availability, and crystal-clear observability. This session will include a customer study on how Oracle Solaris is used in the cloud today to implement the Oracle stack. 12:15 PM - Customer Insight: Oracle Solaris on Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and SPARC SuperCluster(CON8760, Moscone South 270) Hear from customers what benefits they have realized from using the Oracle stack on Oracle Exadata and Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster and from using Oracle Solaris on those engineered systems, taking advantage of built-in lightweight OS virtualization (Zones), enterprise reliability and scale, and other key features. 1:45 PM - Case Study: Mobile Tornado Uses Oracle Technology for Better RAS and TCO?(CON4281, Moscone West 2005) Mobile Tornado develops and markets instant communication platforms, replacing traditional radio networks with cellular networks. Its critical concern is uptime. Find out how they've used Oracle Solaris, Netra SPARC T4, and Oracle Solaris Cluster, including Oracle Solaris ZFS and Zones, for their Oracle Database deployments to improve reliability and drive down cost. 3:15 PM - Technical Panel: Developing High Performance Applications on Oracle Solaris(CON7196, Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2) Engineers from the Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle Tuxedo development teams, and Oracle ISV Engineering discuss how they develop high-performance enterprise applications that take advantage of Oracle's SPARC and x86 servers, with Oracle Solaris Studio and new Oracle Solaris 11 features. Topics will include developer tools, parallel frameworks, best practices, and methodologies, as well as insights and case studies on parallelizing and optimizing application performance on Oracle Solaris. Bring your best questions! 3:15 PM -  x86 Power Management with Oracle Solaris: Current State, Opportunities, and Future(CON6271, Moscone West 2012) Another option for this time slot: learn about how Intel Xeon and Oracle Solaris work together to reduce server power consumption. This presentation addresses some of the recent power management improvements in Oracle Solaris, opportunities to further improve energy efficiency, and some future directions for Oracle Solaris power management.

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• Architects, Leadership, and Influence

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Technical expertise is a given for architects. In addition to solid development experience, extensive knowledge of technical trends, tools, standards, and methodolgies (not to mention business accumen) provides the foundation for the decisions the architect must make in the effort to get all the pieces to work together. But even superior technical chops can't overcome a lack of leadership. Leadership is about influence: the ability to effectively communicate — to sell your ideas and defend your decisions in a manner that affects the decisions of the people around you. Leadership and influence are especially important in situations in which the architect may not have the authority to simply tell people what to do. And even when the architect has that kind of authority, influential leadership can mean the difference between gaining real buy-in and support from colleagues and stakeholders, and settling for their grudging acceptance (or worse). Guess which outcome is likely to produce the best results. In a previous post I presented some examples of the kind of criticism that is leveled at architects, a great deal of which can be attributed to a lack of leadership and influence on the part of the targets of that criticism. So it was serendipitous that I recently ran across a post on the Harvard Business Review blog written by Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe. That post, When Your Influence Is Ineffective, includes this: [I]nfluence becomes ineffective when individuals become so focused on the desired outcome that they fail to fully consider the situation. While the influencer may still gain the short-term desired outcome, he or she can do long-term damage to personal effectiveness and the organization, as it creates an atmosphere of distrust where people stop listening, and the potential for innovation or progress is diminished. The need to "see the big picture" is a grossly reductive assesement of the architect's responsibilities — but that doesn't mean it's not true. That big picture perspective must encompass both the technological elements of the architecture and the elements responsible for implementing those technologies in compliance with the prescribed architecture. Technologies may be tempermental, but they don't have personalities or egos, and they are unlikely to carry a grudge — not yet, anyway (Hello, Skynet!).  Effective leadership and the ability to influence people can help to ensure that all the pieces fit and that they work together, today and tomorrow.

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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• Legality of similar games

  - by Jamie Taylor

  This is my first question on GD.SE, and I hope it's in the right place. A little background: I'm an amateur (read: not explicitly employed to develop games, but am employed as a software developer) game developer and took a ComSci with Games Development degree. My Question: What is the legal situation/standpoint of creating a copycat title? I know that there are only N number of ways of solving a problem, and N number of ways to design a piece of software. Say that an independent developer designed a copycat game (a Tetris clone in this example) for instance, and decided to use that game to generate income for themselves as well as interest for their other products. Say the developer adds a disclaimer into the software along the lines of "based on , originally released c. by ." Are there any legal problems/grey areas with the developer in this example releasing this game, commercially? Would they run into legal problems? Should the developer in this example expect cease and desist orders or law suit claims from original publishers? Have original publishers been known to, effectively, kill independent projects because they are a little too close to older titles? I know that there was, at least, one attempt by a group of independent developers to remake Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sega shut them down. I also know of Sega shutting down development of the independent Streets of Rage Remake. I know that "but it's an old game, your honour," isn't a great legal standpoint when it comes to defending yourself. But, could an independent developer have a law suit filed against them for re-implementing an older title in a new way? I know that there are a lot of copycat versions of the older titles like Tetris available on app stores (and similar services), and that it would be very difficult for a major publisher to shut them all down. Regardless of this, is making a Tetris (or other game) copycat/clone illegal? We were taught lots of different things at University, but we never covered copyright law. I'm presuming that their thought behind it was "IF these students get jobs in games development, they wont need to know anything about the legal side of it, because their employers will have legal departments... presumably" tl;dr Is it illegal to create a clone or copycat of an old title, and make money from it?

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• Using HBase or Cassandra for a token server

  - by crippy

  I've been trying to figure out how to use HBase/Cassandra for a token system we're re-implementing. I can probably squeeze quite a lot more from MySQL, but it just seems it has come to clinging on to the wrong tool for the task just because we know it well. Eventually will hit a wall (like happened to us in other areas). Naturally I started looking into possible NoSQL solutions. The prominent ones (at least in terms of buzz) are HBase and Cassandra. The story is more or less like this: A user can send a gift other users. Each gift has a list of recipients or is public in which case limited by number or expiration date For each gift sent we generate some token that uniquely identifies that gift. For each gift we track the list of potential recipients and their current status relating to that gift (accepted, declinded etc). A user can request to see all his currently pending gifts A can request a list of users he has sent a gift to today (used to limit number of gifts sent) Required the ability to "dump" or "ignore" expired gifts (x day old gifts are considered expired) There are some other requirements but I believe the above covers the essentials. How would I go and model that using HBase or Cassandra? Well, the wall was performance. A few 10s of millions of records per day over 2 tables kept for 2 weeks (wish I could have kept it for more but there was no way). The response times kept getting slower and slower until eventually we had to start cutting down number of days we kept data. Caching helps here but it's not an ideal solution since a big part of the ops are updates. Also, as I hinted in my original post. We use MySQL extensively. We know exactly what it can and can't do both in naive implementations followed by native partitioning and finally by horizontally sharding our dataset on the application level to reside on multiple DB nodes. It can be done, but that's not really what I'm trying to get from this. I asked a very specific question about designing a solution using a NoSQL solution since it's very hard to find examples for designs out there. Brainlag, not trying to come off as rude. I actually appreciate it a lot that you are the only one who even bothered to respond. but I see it over and over again. People ask questions and others assume they have no idea what they're talking about and give an irrelevant answer. Ignore RDBMS please. The question is about nosql.

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• Should a server "be lenient" in what it accepts and "discard faulty input silently"?

  - by romkyns

  I was under the impression that by now everyone agrees this maxim was a mistake. But I recently saw this answer which has a "be lenient" comment upvoted 137 times (as of today). In my opinion, the leniency in what browsers accept was the direct cause of the utter mess that HTML and some other web standards were a few years ago, and have only recently begun to properly crystallize out of that mess. The way I see it, being lenient in what you accept will lead to this. The second part of the maxim is "discard faulty input silently, without returning an error message unless this is required by the specification", and this feels borderline offensive. Any programmer who has banged their head on the wall when something fails silently will know what I mean. So, am I completely wrong about this? Should my program be lenient in what it accepts and swallow errors silently? Or am I mis-interpreting what this is supposed to mean? The original question said "program", and I take everyone's point about that. It can make sense for programs to be lenient. What I really meant, however, is APIs: interfaces exposed to other programs, rather than people. HTTP is an example. The protocol is an interface that only other programs use. People never directly provide the dates that go into headers like "If-Modified-Since". So, the question is: should the server implementing a standard be lenient and allow dates in several other formats, in addition to the one that's actually required by the standard? I believe the "be lenient" is supposed to apply to this situation, rather than human interfaces. If the server is lenient, it might seem like an overall improvement, but I think in practice it only leads to client implementations that end up relying on the leniency and thus failing to work with another server that's lenient in slightly different ways. So, should a server exposing some API be lenient or is that a very bad idea? Now onto lenient handling of user input. Consider YouTrack (a bug tracking software). It uses a language for text entry that is reminiscent of Markdown. Except that it's "lenient". For example, writing - foo - bar - baz is not a documented way of creating a bulleted list, and yet it worked. Consequently, it ended up being used a lot throughout our internal bugtracker. Next version comes out, and this lenient feature starts working slightly differently, breaking a bunch of lists that (mis)used this (non)feature. The documented way to create bulleted lists still works, of course. So, should my software be lenient in what user inputs it accepts?

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• Data structures for a 2D multi-layered and multi-region map?

  - by DevilWithin

  I am working on a 2D world editor and a world format subsequently. If I were to handle the game "world" being created just as a layered set of structures, either in top or side views, it would be considerably simple to do most things. But, since this editor is meant for 3rd parties, I have no clue how big worlds one will want to make and I need to keep in mind that eventually it will become simply too much to check, handling and comparing stuff that are happening completely away from the player position. I know the solution for this is to subdivide my world into sub regions and stream them on the fly, loading and unloading resources and other data. This way I know a virtually infinite game area is achievable. But, while I know theoretically what to do, I really have a few questions I'd hoped to get answered for some hints about the topic. The logic way to handle the regions is some kind of grid, would you pick evenly distributed blocks with equal sizes or would you let the user subdivide areas by taste with irregular sized rectangles? In case of even grids, would you use some kind of block/chunk neighbouring system to check when the player transposes the limit or just put all those in a simple array? Being a region a different data structure than its owner "game world", when streaming a region, would you deliver the objects to the parent structures and track them for unloading later, or retain the objects in each region for a more "hard-limit" approach? Introducing the subdivision approach to the project, and already having a multi layered scene graph structure on place, how would i make it support the new concept? Would you have the parent node have the layers as children, and replicate in each layer node, a node per region? Or the opposite, parent node owns all the regions possible, and each region has multiple layers as children? Or would you just put the region logic outside the graph completely(compatible with the first suggestion in Q.3) When I say virtually infinite worlds, I mean it of course under the contraints of the variable sizes and so on. Using float positions, a HUGE world can already be made. Do you think its sane to think beyond that? Because I think its ok to stick to this limit since it will never be reached so easily.. As for when to stream a region, I'm implementing it as a collection of watcher cameras, which the streaming system works with to know what to load/unload. The problem here is, i will be needing some kind of warps/teleports built in for my game, and there is a chance i will be teleporting a player to a unloaded region far away. How would you approach something like this? Is it sane to load any region to memory which can be teleported to by a warp within a radius from the player? Sorry for the huge question, any answers are helpful!

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• eSTEP Newsletter for October 2013 now available

  - by uwes

  Dear Partners,We would like to let you know that the October'13 issue of our Newsletter is now available.The issue contains information on the following topics: Oracle Open World Summary Oracle Cloud: Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Database and Middleware Oracle Applications and Software as a Service Oracle Industries Oracle Partners and the "Internet of Things" JavaOne News MySQL News Corporate News Create Your HR Strategic Vision at Oracle HCM World Oracle Database Protection Redefined A Preview: Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance Oracle closed Tekelec acquisition Congratulations to ORACLE TEAM USA! Tech sectionARC M6 Oracle's SPARC M6 Oracle SuperCluster M6-32 - Oracle’s Most Scalable Engineered System Oracle Multitenant on SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition: Plug into the Cloud Oracle In-Memory Database Cache Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance New Benchmark-Results published (Sept. 2013) Video Interview: Elasticity, the Biggest Challenge Facing Data Centers Today Tech blog Announcing New Sun Storage 2500-M2 Drives SPARC Product Line Update ZFS RAID Calculator v6 What ships with ODA X3-2? Tech Article: Oracle Multitenant on SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris New release of Sun Rack II capacity calculator available Announcing: Oracle Solaris Cluster Product Bulletin, September 2013 Learning & events Planned TechCasts Quarterly Partner Update Live Webcast: Simplify and Accelerate Oracle Database deployment with Oracle VM Templates Join us for OTN's Virtual Developer Day - Harnessing the Power of Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Coherence.Learn from OOW 2013 what is going on in Virtualization How to Implementing Early Arriving Facts in ODI, Part I and Part II: Proof of Concept Overview Multi-Factor Authentication in Oracle WebLogic Using multi-factor authentication to protect web applications deployed on Oracle WebLogic. If Virtualization Is Free, It Can't Be Any Good—Right? Looking beyond System/HW SOA and User Interfaces Overcoming the challenges to developing user interfaces in a service oriented References Vodafone Romania Improves Business Agility and Customer Satisfaction, with 10x Faster Business Intelligence Delivery and 12x Faster Processing Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Captures 47% Market Share in a Competitive Market, Thanks to 24/7 Availability Home Credit and Finance Bank Accelerates Getting New Banking Products to Market Extra A Conversation with Java Champion Johan VosYou can find the Newsletter on our portal under eSTEP News ---> Latest Newsletter. You will need to provide your email address and the pin below to get access. Link to the portal is shown below.URL: http://launch.oracle.com/PIN: eSTEP_2011Previous published Newsletters can be found under the Archived Newsletters section and more useful information under the Events, Download and Links tab. Feel free to explore and any feedback is appreciated to help us improve the service and information we deliver.Thanks and best regards,Partner HW Enablement EMEA

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• Behaviour Trees with irregular updates

  - by Robominister

  I'm interested in behaviour trees that aren't iterated every game tick, but every so often. (Edit: the tree could specify how many frames within the main game loop to wait before running its tick function again). Every theoretical implementation I have seen of behaviour trees talks of the tree search being carried out every game update - which seems necessary, because a leaf node (eg a behaviour, like 'return to base') needs to be constantly checked to see if is still running, failed or completed. Can anyone suggest how I might start implementing a tree that isnt run every tick, or point me in the direction of good material specific to this case (I am struggling to find anything)? My thoughts so far: action leaf nodes (when they start) must only push some kind of action object onto a list for an entity, rather than directly calling any code that makes the entity do something. The list of actions for the entity would be run every frame (update any that need to run, pop any that have completed from the list). the return state from a given action must be fed back into the tree, so that when we run the tree iteration again (and reach the same action leaf node - so the tree has so far determined that we ought to still be trying this action) - that the action has completed, or is still running etc. If my actual action code is running from an action list on an entity, then I possibly need to cancel previously running actions in the list - i am thinking that I can just delete the entire stack of queued up actions. I've seen the idea of ActionLists which block lower priority actions when a higher priority one is added, but this seems like very close logic to behaviour trees, and I dont want to be duplicating behaviour. This leaves me with some questions 1) How would I feed the action return state back into the tree? Its obvious I need to store some information relating to 'currently executing actions' on the entity, and check that in the tree tick, but I can't imagine how. 2) Does having a seperate behaviour tree (for deciding behaviour) and action list (for carrying out actual queued up actions) sound like a reasonable approach? 3) Is the approach of updating a behaviour tree irregularly actually used by anyone? It seems like a nice idea for budgeting ai search time when you have a lot of ai entities to process. (Edit) - I am also thinking about storing a single instance of a given behaviour tree in memory, and providing it by reference to any entity that uses it. So any information about what action was last selected for execution on an entity must be stored in a data context relative to the entity (which the tree can check). (I am probably answering my own questions as i go!) I hope I have expressed my questions adequately! Thanks in advance for any help :)

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• Is code like this a "train wreck" (in violation of Law of Demeter)?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Browsing through some code I've written, I came across the following construct which got me thinking. At a first glance, it seems clean enough. Yes, in the actual code the getLocation() method has a slightly more specific name which better describes exactly which location it gets. service.setLocation(this.configuration.getLocation().toString()); In this case, service is an instance variable of a known type, declared within the method. this.configuration comes from being passed in to the class constructor, and is an instance of a class implementing a specific interface (which mandates a public getLocation() method). Hence, the return type of the expression this.configuration.getLocation() is known; specifically in this case, it is a java.net.URL, whereas service.setLocation() wants a String. Since the two types String and URL are not directly compatible, some sort of conversion is required to fit the square peg in the round hole. However, according to the Law of Demeter as cited in Clean Code, a method f in class C should only call methods on C, objects created by or passed as arguments to f, and objects held in instance variables of C. Anything beyond that (the final toString() in my particular case above, unless you consider a temporary object created as a result of the method invocation itself, in which case the whole Law seems to be moot) is disallowed. Is there a valid reasoning why a call like the above, given the constraints listed, should be discouraged or even disallowed? Or am I just being overly nitpicky? If I were to implement a method URLToString() which simply calls toString() on a URL object (such as that returned by getLocation()) passed to it as a parameter, and returns the result, I could wrap the getLocation() call in it to achieve exactly the same result; effectively, I would just move the conversion one step outward. Would that somehow make it acceptable? (It seems to me, intuitively, that it should not make any difference either way, since all that does is move things around a little. However, going by the letter of the Law of Demeter as cited, it would be acceptable, since I would then be operating directly on a parameter to a function.) Would it make any difference if this was about something slightly more exotic than calling toString() on a standard type? When answering, do keep in mind that altering the behavior or API of the type that the service variable is of is not practical. Also, for the sake of argument, let's say that altering the return type of getLocation() is also impractical.

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• What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase?

  - by GordonM

  I'm currently working at a company with 2 other PHP developers aside from me, and 1 junior developer. The senior developer who originally built the system we're all working on has resigned and will only be here for a matter of weeks. The other developer, who is the only other guy who knows anything about the system, is unhappy here and is looking for a new job. I'm very real danger of being left behind as the only experienced developer on this codebase. Since I've joined this company I've tried to push for better coding standards, project documentation, etc and I do think I've made some headway, but the vast majority of the code is simply unmaintainable and uncommented. A lot of this has to do with the need to get things done fast at points in the project before I joined, but now the technical debt is enormous, even with the two developers who do understand the system on board. Without them, it will simply be impossible to do anything with it. The senior developer is working on trying to at least comment all his code before he leaves but I think the codebase is simply too vast to properly document in the remaining time. Besides, when he does comment it still doesn't make things as clear as it could. If the system was better organized and documented I could probably start refactoring it incrementally, but the whole thing is so tightly coupled that it's very difficult to make any changes in one module without having unintended knock-on effects in other modules. Naturally, there's no unit tests either, and I honestly don't think this codebase could possibly be unit tested anyway given how it's implemented. There also never seems to be enough time to get things done even with 3 developers and 1 junior developer. With one developer and one junior, neither of which had significant input into the early design of the system, I don't see how we could possibly get anything done with keeping the current system working, implementing new features as needed and developing a replacement for the current codebase that is better organized. Is there an approach I can take to cope with this situation, or should I be getting my own CV in order as well at this point? If it was just me and the junior designer who would be left I'd go for the latter option almost without question. However, there's a team of front-end developers and content managers as well, and I'm worried what would become of them if I left and put them in a position where there would be no developers at all. The department might just be closed down altogether under such circumstances, and then I'd have their unemployment on my conscience as well!

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• Assessing Relative Maintainability

  - by João Bragança

  We (a contractor, actually) are implementing an off the shelf system to replace a legacy homegrown system for the core domain of the company (designing widgets). Unfortunately both systems will have to run concurrently for some time, as the product just isn't ready yet. Also, the decision was made to only migrate some of the widgets from the legacy system, based on date of last sale activity. Later on a new requirement came down: certain people in the company, most of them outside of the widget development context, want to search all widgets. The search results screen has 3 pieces of data: a GUID, a human readable id that is searchable, and a brief description (may need to be searchable in the future). In the widget details, there will be multiple screens. These screens align very well along SOA / bounded context lines - a screen for marketing data, a screen for sales history, etc. UML ahead! I am probably using the wrong kind of arrows here so please forgive me. The current solution - which is not in production yet - is something like the following: Both systems will be queried and the controller will merge the results. The new system has its own proprietary query language (we've alleviated this a bit with a LINQ provider). It also puts a lot of data on the wire. 15 search results typically run about 60k of unintelligible SOAP-wrapped xml. So I would prefer to avoid querying this system directly. These two systems publish events to help us integrate with other systems, mainly an ERP system. One of these events contains all the data necessary for the search screen. I proposed the following alternative: However I am being told that 'adding another database' will create more maintenance down the road. However, I believe this to be false, as I had to add a relatively simple feature that took several hours longer than anticipated because of this merging code. I want to get a feel for which system is more maintainable in the long run. I personally have not had the burden of maintaining any large system. I want something more than my gut. Specifically I'd like to know if having more, specialized physical databases is more or less maintainable than having less larger physical databases.

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• Monitoring C++ applications

  - by Scott A

  We're implementing a new centralized monitoring solution (Zenoss). Incorporating servers, networking, and Java programs is straightforward with SNMP and JMX. The question, however, is what are the best practices for monitoring and managing custom C++ applications in large, heterogenous (Solaris x86, RHEL Linux, Windows) environments? Possibilities I see are: Net SNMP Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions we run Net SNMP daemons on our servers already Disadvantages: complex implementation (MIBs, Net SNMP library) new technology to introduce for the C++ developers rsyslog Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard unknown integration into monitoring solutions (I know they can do alerts based on text, but how well would it work for sending telemetry like memory usage, queue depths, thread capacity, etc) simple implementation Disadvantages: possible integration issues somewhat new technology for C++ developers possible porting issues if we switch monitoring vendors probably involves coming up with an ad-hoc communication protocol (or using RFC5424 structured data; I don't know if Zenoss supports that without custom Zenpack coding) Embedded JMX (embed a JVM and use JNI) Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions somewhat simple implementation (we already do this today for other purposes) Disadvantages: complexity (JNI, thunking layer between native C++ and Java, basically writing the management code twice) possible stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory JMX is new technology for C++ developers each process has it's own JMX port (we run a lot of processes on each machine) Local JMX daemon, processes connect to it Advantages single, central daemon on each server consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions Disadvantages: complexity (basically writing the management code twice) need to find or write such a daemon need a protocol between the JMX daemon and the C++ process JMX is new technology for C++ developers CodeMesh JunC++ion Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions single, central daemon on each server when run in shared JVM mode somewhat simple implementation (requires code generation) Disadvantages: complexity (code generation, requires a GUI and several rounds of tweaking to produce the proxied code) possible JNI stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory (in embedded mode) Does not support Solaris x86 (deal breaker) Even if it did support Solaris x86, there are possible compiler compatibility issues (we use an odd combination of STLPort and Forte on Solaris each process has it's own JMX port when run in embedded mode (we run a lot of processes on each machine) possibly precludes a shared JMX server for non-C++ processes (?) Is there some reasonably standardized, simple solution I'm missing? Given no other reasonable solutions, which of these solutions is typically used for custom C++ programs? My gut feel is that Net SNMP is how people do this, but I'd like other's input and experience before I make a decision.

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• How to refactor my design, if it seems to require multiple inheritance?

  - by Omega

  Recently I made a question about Java classes implementing methods from two sources (kinda like multiple inheritance). However, it was pointed out that this sort of need may be a sign of a design flaw. Hence, it is probably better to address my current design rather than trying to simulate multiple inheritance. Before tackling the actual problem, some background info about a particular mechanic in this framework: It is a simple game development framework. Several components allocate some memory (like pixel data), and it is necessary to get rid of it as soon as you don't need it. Sprites are an example of this. Anyway, I decided to implement something ala Manual-Reference-Counting from Objective-C. Certain classes, like Sprites, contain an internal counter, which is increased when you call retain(), and decreased on release(). Thus the Resource abstract class was created. Any subclass of this will obtain the retain() and release() implementations for free. When its count hits 0 (nobody is using this class), it will call the destroy() method. The subclass needs only to implement destroy(). This is because I don't want to rely on the Garbage Collector to get rid of unused pixel data. Game objects are all subclasses of the Node class - which is the main construction block, as it provides info such as position, size, rotation, etc. See, two classes are used often in my game. Sprites and Labels. Ah... but wait. Sprites contain pixel data, remember? And as such, they need to extend Resource. But this, of course, can't be done. Sprites ARE nodes, hence they must subclass Node. But heck, they are resources too. Why not making Resource an interface? Because I'd have to re-implement retain() and release(). I am avoiding this in virtue of not writing the same code over and over (remember that there are multiple classes that need this memory-management system). Why not composition? Because I'd still have to implement methods in Sprite (and similar classes) that essentially call the methods of Resource. I'd still be writing the same code over and over! What is your advice in this situation, then?

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