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• unit level testing, agile, and refactoring

  - by dsollen

  I'm working on a very agile development system, a small number of people with my doing the vast majority of progaming myself. I've gotten to the testing phase and find myself writing mostly functional level testing, which I should in theory be leavning for our tester (in practice I don't entirely...trust our tester to detect and identify defects enough to leave him the sole writter of functional tests). In theory what I should be writing is Unit level tests. However, I'm not sure it's worth the expense. Unit testing takes some time to do, more then functional testing since I have to set up mocks and plugs into smaller units that weren't design to run in issolation. More importantly, I find I refactor and redesign heavily-part of this is due to my inherriting code that needed heavy redesign and is still being cleaned up, but even once I've finished removing parts that need work I'm sure in the act of expanding the code I'll still do a decent amount of refactoring and redesign. It feels as if I will break my unit tests, forcing wasted time to refactor them as well, often due to unit test, by definition, having to be coupled so closely to the code structure. So.is it worth all the wasted time when functional tests, that will never break when I refactor/redesign, should find most defects? Do unit tests really provide that much extra defect detetection over through functional? and how does one create good unit tests that work with very quick and agile code that is modified rapidly? ps, I would be fine/happy with links to anything one considers an excellent resource for how to 'do' unit testing in a highly changing enviroment. edit: to clarify I am doing a bit of very unoffical TDD, I just seem to be writing tests on what would be considered a functional level rather then unit level. I think part of this is becaus I own nearly all of the project I don't feel I need to limit the scope as much; and part of it is that it's daunting to think of trying to go back and retroactively add the unit tests needed to cover enough code that I can feel comfortable testing only a unit without the full functionality and trust that unit still works with the rest of the units.

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• Does waterfall require code complete before QA steps in?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  The process used at a certain company consists of: Create a layout according to some designs made in a web page design tool. (CSS, html) Requirements come in with "functional requirements". These consist of 100's of lines of business directions. E.G. Create a Table on page X. Column1 has numeric data. Column1 is the client code. Column2 is a string...etc. Write code to meet all functional requirements. When all code is checked in, send to QA (which is the BA that wrote the requirements) for inspection, bug finds and change requests. Punt back to developer with a list of X bugs and Y change requests. While bug finds or change requests 0 go to step 4. The agile development environments I have worked in allow, if not demand, early QA inspection and early user acceptance. So, pieces of the program can be refined and redefined before the entire application is in place. Not only that, but the process leaves little room for error or people changing their minds. Instead, those "change requests" come in at the last stage when they do the most damage. And being that a bug-fix's cost increases over time, this is a costly way to write code. I am no waterfall expert. As described, is this waterfall being mishandled in some way? How does waterfall address my concerns?

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• Optimizing lifestyle and training

  - by Gabe

  I am a college freshman who has recently discovered a passion for computer science. Having had my first lick of formal python training last semester, I have cast aside my previously hedonist way of life and tunneled my sights on becoming the most rounded and proficient programmer I can be. I know that I'm taking strides in the right direction (I've stopped smoking, I've been exercising every day, I've taught myself C++ and OpenGL, and I've begun training in kung-fu and meditation), yet I am still finding myself struggling to achieve satisfactory results. I would like to be able to spend a good 3-4 hours every day burning through textbooks. I have the time cleared and the resources allocated. The problem lies in the logistics-- I have never taken anything seriously before. Recently I've realized that I am clueless when it comes to taking care of myself and gaining control of my mind, and it drastically hinders my productivity. My question is this: How can I learn to manage my time and take care of myself such that I can spend the maximum amount of time every day studying with steady concentration? Personal tricks would be key here: techniques you use to get yourself to sleep, a diet that yields focus, even computer break stretching routines or active reading techniques. Anything you could think of here would be great. I was a low-life in high school and I have the drive to turn my life around, I'm just quite a bit behind in the way of good habits :)

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• Why no fortran standard library ?

  - by Stefano Borini

  To be a language focused on mathematics and scientific computing, I am always baffled by the total lack of useful mathematical routines in the Fortran standard library. One would expect it to be shipped at least with a routine to compute standard deviation and mean, but this is not the case. In particular with the introduction of Fortran 90 and the addition of modules (thus reducing namespace pollution), I don't see any reason why of this critical lack of services. I would like to hear your knowledge about why this is the case.

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• How to ask the boss to pay for training courses

  - by jiceo

  Recently I came upon a well known local consulting company that has some interesting courses I'd like to take. The course is not cheap enough for me to pay out of my own pocket and not feel bad afterwards. The thing is that my startup company uses one set of framework (Python+Django) for most of the stuff I have to deal with, but the course covers Ruby on Rails 3. Since I've not had exposure to Ruby on Rails, and after seeing so many people speak highly of the course, I really thought it would be a good opportunity. I know that I'd have to approach my boss at the angle of 'how this might benefit the company' but other than this, any suggestions?

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• Should we have a database independent SQL like query language in Django?

  - by Yugal Jindle

  Note : I know we have Django ORM already that keeps things database independent and converts to the database specific SQL queries. Once things starts getting complicated it is preferred to write raw SQL queries for better efficiency. When you write raw sql queries your code gets trapped with the database you are using. I also understand its important to use the full power of your database that can-not be achieved with the django orm alone. My Question : Until I use any database specific feature, why should one be trapped with the database. For instance : We have a query with multiple joins and we decided to write a raw sql query. Now, that makes my website postgres specific. Even when I have not used any postgres specific feature. I feel there should be some fake sql language which can translate to any database's sql query. Even Django's ORM can be built over it. So, that if you go out of ORM but not database specific - you can still remain database independent. I asked the same question to Jacob Kaplan Moss (In person) : He advised me to stay with the database that I like and endure its whole power, to which I agree. But my point was not that we should be database independent. My point is we should be database independent until we use a database specific feature. Please explain, why should be there a fake sql layer over the actual sql ?

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• Methods to Manage/Document "one-off" Reports

  - by Jason Holland

  I'm a programmer that also does database stuff and I get a lot of so-called one-time report requests and recurring report requests. I work at a company that has a SQL Server database that we integrate third-party data with and we also have some third-party vendors that we have to use their proprietary reporting system to extract data in flat file format from that we don't integrate into SQL Server for security reasons. To generate many of these reports I have to query data from various systems, write small scripts to combine data from the separate systems, cry, pull my hair, curse the last guy's name that made the report before me, etc. My question is, what are some good methods for documenting the steps taken to generate these reports so the next poor soul that has to do them won't curse my name? As of now I just have a folder with subfolders per project with the selects and scripts that generated the last report but that seems like a "poor man's" solution. :)

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• Is it possible to connect Flash applications to a server build with Delphi?

  - by Japie Bosman

  I have developed a client/server application using Firebird and developed with Delphi, having some clients that is also in Delphi, which I know how to do. But what I want to know is if it is possible to connect some Flash applications as clients to the Delphi developed server? The Flash applications must be able to access data in the database and also be able to update and insert records. Can something like this be done? Im using Delphi XE2 and the Flash is written with Actionscript 3

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• data handling with javascript

  - by Vincent Warmerdam

  Python has a very neat package called pandas which allows for quick data transformation; tables, aggregation, that sort of thing. A lot of these types of functionality can also be found in the python itertools module. The plyR package in R is also very similar. Usually one woud use this functionality to produce a table which is later visualized with a plot. I am personally very fond of d3, and I would like to allow the user to first indicate what type of data aggregation he wants on the dataset before it is visualized. The visualisation in question involves making a heatmap where the user gets to select the size of the bins of the heatmap beforehand (I want d3 to project this through leaflet). I want to visually select the ideal size of the bins for the heatmap. The way I work now is that I take the dataset, aggregate it with python and then manually load it in d3. This is a process that takes a lot of human effort and I was wondering if the data aggregation can be done through the javascript of the browser. I couldn't find a package for javascript specifically built for data, suggesting (to me) that this is a bad idea and that one should not use javascript for the data handling. Is there a good module/package for javascript to handle data aggregation? Is it a good/bad idea to do the data aggregation in javascript (performance wise)?

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• How important is positive feedback in code reviews?

  - by c_maker

  Is it important to point out the good parts of the code during a code review and the reasons why it is good? Positive feedback might be just as useful for the developer being reviewed and for the others that participate in the review. We are doing reviews using an online tool, so developers can open reviews for their committed code and others can review their code within a given time period (e.g. 1 week). Others can comment on the code or other reviewer's comments. Should there be a balance between positive and negative feedback?

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• Resources for Test Driven Development in Web Applications?

  - by HorusKol

  I would like to try and implement some TDD in our web applications to reduce regressions and improve release quality, but I'm not convinced at how well automated testing can perform with something as fluffy as web applications. I've read about and tried TDD and unit testing, but the examples are 'solid' and rather simple functionalities like currency converters, and so on. Are there any resources that can help with unit testing content management and publication systems? How about unit testing a shopping cart/store (physical and online products)? AJAX? Googling for "Web Test Driven Development" just gets me old articles from several years ago either covering the same examples of calculator-like function or discussions about why TDD is better than anything (without any examples).

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• Should one always know what an API is doing just by looking at the code?

  - by markmnl

  Recently I have been developing my own API and with that invested interest in API design I have been keenly interested how I can improve my API design. One aspect that has come up a couple times is (not by users of my API but in my observing discussion about the topic): one should know just by looking at the code calling the API what it is doing. For example see this discussion on GitHub for the discourse repo, it goes something like: foo.update_pinned(true, true); Just by looking at the code (without knowing the parameter names, documentation etc.) one cannot guess what it is going to do - what does the 2nd argument mean? The suggested improvement is to have something like: foo.pin() foo.unpin() foo.pin_globally() And that clears things up (the 2nd arg was whether to pin foo globally, I am guessing), and I agree in this case the later would certainly be an improvement. However I believe there can be instances where methods to set different but logically related state would be better exposed as one method call rather than separate ones, even though you would not know what it is doing just by looking at the code. (So you would have to resort to looking at the parameter names and documentation to find out - which personally I would always do no matter what if I am unfamiliar with an API). For example I expose one method SetVisibility(bool, string, bool) on a FalconPeer and I acknowledge just looking at the line: falconPeer.SetVisibility(true, "aerw3", true); You would have no idea what it is doing. It is setting 3 different values that control the "visibility" of the falconPeer in the logical sense: accept join requests, only with password and reply to discovery requests. Splitting this out into 3 method calls could lead to a user of the API to set one aspect of "visibility" forgetting to set others that I force them to think about by only exposing the one method to set all aspects of "visibility". Furthermore when the user wants to change one aspect they almost always will want to change another aspect and can now do so in one call.

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• C++ - Constructor or Initialize Method to Startup

  - by Bob Fincheimer

  I want to determine when to do non-trivial initialization of a class. I see two times to do initialization: constructor and other method. I want to figure out when to use each. Choice 1: Constructor does initialization MyClass::MyClass(Data const& data) : m_data() { // does non-trivial initialization here } MyClass::~MyClass() { // cleans up here } Choice 2: Defer initialization to an initialize method MyClass::MyClass() : m_data() {} MyClass::Initialize(Data const& data) { // does non-trivial initialization here } MyClass::~MyClass() { // cleans up here } So to try and remove any subjectivity I want to figure out which is better in a couple of situations: Class that encapsulates a resource (window/font/some sort of handle) Class that composites resources to do something (a control/domain object) Data structure classes (tree/list/etc.) [Anything else you can think of] Things to analyze: Performance Ease of use by other developers How error-prone/opportunities for bugs [Anything else you can think of]

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• Is using something other than XML advisable for my configuration file?

  - by Earlz

  I have a small tool I'm designing which would require a configuration file of some sort. The configuration file in my case is really more of a database, but it needs to be lightweight, and if needed the end-user should find it easily editable. However, it also will contain a lot of things in it. (depending on certain factors, could be 1Mb or more) I've decided I'd rather use plain ol' text, rather than trying to use SQLite or some such. However, with using text, I also have to deal with the variety of formats. So far, my options are XML JSON Custom format The data in my file is quite simple consisting for the most part of key-value type things. So, a custom format wouldn't be that difficult... but I'd rather not have to worry about writing the support for it. I've never seen JSON used for configuration files. And XML would bloat the file size substantially I think. (I also just has a dislike of XML in general). What should I do in this case? Factors to consider: This configuration file can be uploaded to a web service(so size matters) Users must be able to edit it by hand if necessary(ease of editing and reading matters) Must be able to generate and process automatically (speed doesn't matter a lot, but not excessively slow) The "keys" and "values" are plain strings, but must be escaped because they can contain anything. (unicode and escaping has to work easily)

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• What was your most challenging project? and why? [closed]

  - by tau

  I am asked this question many times in the interviews. I get confused about which project to tell them and why some project would look challenging or non-challenging. What are they looking for in the answer? Any software is a challenge before it gets started and it becomes a normal software engineering task after it has finished. All softwares I made were challenging until they got finished. Do I misunderstood the word "challenge"? Whats wrong in my thinking? What was your most challenging project and why you think so?

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• Where to find clients?

  - by Zenph

  My main area: web development. Of course, I don't expect anybody give away their 'gold mine' or whatever but I am struggling to see where I should be advertising my services. I have one other developer I work with and we have a lot of happy clients - on freelance websites. Thing is, freelance websites just seem to suck the life out of you when you're being out-bidded by ridiculous rates. I want to attract customers who are more concerned about quality and accountability than price. Any suggestions at all? I'm so lost with this. EDIT: Added bounty of 200 - all of my 'reputation'. EDIT: Added second bounty of 50 I did hear of a novel idea. Do work for an opensource project and get featured in their 'trusted developers' section, if they have one. Input?

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• How to convince my boss that quality is a good thing to have in code?

  - by Kristof Claes

  My boss came to me today to ask me if we could implement a certain feature in 1.5 days. I had a look at it and told him that 2 to 3 days would be more realistic. He then asked me: "And what if we do it quick and dirty?" I asked him to explain what he meant with "quick and dirty". It turns out, he wants us to write code as quickly as humanly possible by (for example) copying bits and pieces from other projects, putting all code in the code-behind of the WebForms pages, stop caring about DRY and SOLID and assuming that the code and functionalities will never ever have to be modified or changed. What's even worse, he doesn't want us do it for just this one feature, but for all the code we write. We can make more profit when we do things quick and dirty. Clients don't want to pay for you taking into account that something might change in the future. The profits for us are in delivering code as quick as possible. As long as the application does what it needs to do, the quality of the code doesn't matter. They never see the code. I have tried to convince him that this is a bad way to think as the manager of a software company, but he just wouldn't listen to my arguments: Developer motivation: I explained that it is hard to keep developers motivated when they are constantly under pressure of unrealistic deadlines and budget to write sloppy code very quickly. Readability: When a project gets passed on to another developer, cleaner and better structured code will be easier to read and understand. Maintainability: It is easier, safer and less time consuming to adapt, extend or change well written code. Testability: It is usually easier to test and find bugs in clean code. My co-workers are as baffled as I am by my boss' standpoint, but we can't seem to get to him. He keeps on saying that by making things more quickly, we can sell more projects, ask a lower price for them while still making a bigger profit. And in the end these projects pay the developer's salaries. What more can I say to make him see he is wrong? I want to buy him copies of Peopleware and The Mythical Man-Month, but I have a feeling they won't change his mind either. A lot of you will probably say something like "Run! Get out of there now!" or "I'd quit!", but that's not really an option since .NET web development jobs are rather rare in the region where I live...

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• How common is it to submit papers to journals or conferences outside of academia?

  - by Furry

  I worked in academia a few years, but more on the D-side of R&D. The race for papers never appealed to me and I'm a practical not theoretical type, but I do like reading papers on certain topics (e.g. Google Papers, NLP, FB papers, ...) a lot. How common is it that normally working developers submit papers to conferences or even journals? It seems to be somewhat common in certain companies (it's not common or encouraged in mine). Do journals or conferences even take papers by an academic nobody (BSc) under consideration? I ask, because I have a few rough ideas and I would just like to bring them into form, one way or the other. Bonus question: Is there a list of CS (in the widest sense) conferences/journals with short descriptions? PS (Four out of five researchers I met published quite some fluffy stuff for my taste. I am no expert, but those people told me sometimes themselves, that the implementation does not matter, just the idea and the presentation. I always wondered about that. I probably could write about ideas all day long (not instantly but with a bit of preparation), but the implementation and the practical part is the really hard part, that academia just does not like to be concerned with. Also many papers actually scream: I was written so the publication list of my author gets longer - which is a waste of time for everyone, and often a waste of tax money, too. When I think of CS-ish papers, I think of running implementations or actual data, like e.g. Google's Map Reduce, Serving Large-scale Batch Computed Data with Project Voldemort or the like.)

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• Choosing the right language for the job

  - by Ampt

  I'm currently working for a company on the engineering team of about 5-6 people and have been given the job of heading up the redesign of an embedded system tester. We've decided the general requirements and attributes that would be desirable in the system, and now I have to decide on a language to use for the system, or at the very least come up with a list of languages with pros and cons to present to the team. The general idea of the project is that we currently have a tester written in c++, which was never designed to be a tester, but instead has evolved to be such over the course of 3-4 years due to need. Writing tests for a new product requires modifying the 'framework' and writing code that is completely non-human readable or intuitive due to the way the system was originally designed. Now, we've decided that the time to modify this tester for each new product that we want to test has become too high and want to partially re-write the system so that we can program the actual tests in a scripting language that would then use the modified c++ framework on the back end to test the actual systems. The c++ framework would be responsible for doing all the actual work and the scripting language would just integrate with that to tell the framework what to do. Never having programmed in a scripting language (we program embedded systems), I've run into a wall where I have no experience with any of the languages that we could possibly use, but must somehow give pros and cons of each language so that we can choose the best one for the job. Currently my short list of possibilities includes: Python TCL Lua Perl My question is this: How can a person evaluate a language that he/she has never used before? What criteria are good indicators for a languages potential usability on a project? While helpful suggestions for my particular case are appreciated, I feel that this is a good skill to possess and would like to be able to apply this to many different projects if at all possible

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• Using a subset of GetHashCode() to increase AzureTable performance through partitioning

  - by makerofthings7

  Generally speaking, Azure Table IO performance improves as more partitions are used (with some tradeoffs in continuation tokens and batch updates I won't go into). Since the partition key is always a string I am considering using a "natural" load balancing technique based on a subset of the GetHashCode() of the partition key, and appending this subset to the partition key itself. This will allow all direct PK/RK queries to be computed with little overhead and with ease. Batch updates may just need an intermediate to group similar PKs together prior to submission. Question: Should I use GetHashCode() to compute the partition key? Is a better function available? If I use GetHashCode() does it matter which character I use for my PK? Is there an abstraction for Azure Table and Blob storage that does this for me already?

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• Where does this concept of "favor composition over inheritance" come from?

  - by Mason Wheeler

  In the last few months, the mantra "favor composition over inheritance" seems to have sprung up out of nowhere and become almost some sort of meme within the programming community. And every time I see it, I'm a little bit mystified. It's like someone said "favor drills over hammers." In my experience, composition and inheritance are two different tools with different use cases, and treating them as if they were interchangeable and one was inherently superior to the other makes no sense. Also, I never see a real explanation for why inheritance is bad and composition is good, which just makes me more suspicious. Is it supposed to just be accepted on faith? Liskov substitution and polymorphism have well-known, clear-cut benefits, and IMO comprise the entire point of using object-oriented programming, and no one ever explains why they should be discarded in favor of composition. Does anyone know where this concept comes from, and what the rationale behind it is?

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• Questions re: Eclipse Jobs API

  - by BenCole

  Similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8738160/eclipse-jobs-api-for-a-stand-alone-swing-project This question mentions the Jobs API from the Eclipse IDE: ...The disadvantage of the pre-3.0 approach was that the user had to wait until an operation completed before the UI became responsive again. The UI still provided the user the ability to cancel the currently running operation but no other work could be done until the operation completed. Some operations were performed in the background (resource decoration and JDT file indexing are two such examples) but these operations were restricted in the sense that they could not modify the workspace. If a background operation did try to modify the workspace, the UI thread would be blocked if the user explicitly performed an operation that modified the workspace and, even worse, the user would not be able to cancel the operation. A further complication with concurrency was that the interaction between the independent locking mechanisms of different plug-ins often resulted in deadlock situations. Because of the independent nature of the locks, there was no way for Eclipse to recover from the deadlock, which forced users to kill the application... ...The functionality provided by the workspace locking mechanism can be broken down into the following three aspects: Resource locking to ensure multiple operations did not concurrently modify the same resource Resource change batching to ensure UI stability during an operation Identification of an appropriate time to perform incremental building With the introduction of the Jobs API, these areas have been divided into separate mechanisms and a few additional facilities have been added. The following list summarizes the facilities added. Job class: support for performing operations or other work in the background. ISchedulingRule interface: support for determining which jobs can run concurrently. WorkspaceJob and two IWorkspace#run() methods: support for batching of delta change notifications. Background auto-build: running of incremental build at a time when no other running operations are affecting resources. ILock interface: support for deadlock detection and recovery. Job properties for configuring user feedback for jobs run in the background. The rest of this article provides examples of how to use the above-mentioned facilities... In regards to above API, is this an implementation of a particular design pattern? Which one?

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• White box testing with Google Test

  - by Daemin

  I've been trying out using GoogleTest for my C++ hobby project, and I need to test the internals of a component (hence white box testing). At my previous work we just made the test classes friends of the class being tested. But with Google Test that doesn't work as each test is given its own unique class, derived from the fixture class if specified, and friend-ness doesn't transfer to derived classes. Initially I created a test proxy class that is friends with the tested class. It contains a pointer to an instance of the tested class and provides methods for the required, but hidden, members. This worked for a simple class, but now I'm up to testing a tree class with an internal private node class, of which I need to access and mess with. I'm just wondering if anyone using the GoogleTest library has done any white box testing and if they have any hints or helpful constructs that would make this easier. Ok, I've found the FRIEND_TEST macro defined in the documentation, as well as some hints on how to test private code in the advanced guide. But apart from having a huge amount of friend declerations (i.e. one FRIEND_TEST for each test), is there an easier idion to use, or should I abandon using GoogleTest and move to a different test framework?

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• Pros and cons of using Grails compared to pure Groovy

  - by shabunc

  Say, you (by you I mean an abstract guy, any guy in your team) have experience of writing and building java web apps, know about filters, servlet mappings and so on, and so on. Also, let us assume you know pretty well any sql db, no matter which one exactly, whether it mysql, oracle or psql. At last, let pretend we know Groovy and its standard libraries, for example all that JsonBuilder and XmlSlurper stuff, so we don't need grails converters. The question is - what are benefits of using grails in this case. I'm not trying to start flame war, I'm just asking to compare - what are ups and downs of grails development compared to pure groovy one. For instance, off the top of my head I can name two pluses - automatic DB mapping and custom gsp tags. But when I want to write a modest app which provides small API for handling some well defined set of data, I'm totally OK with groovy's awesome SQL support. As for gsp, we does not use it at all, so we are not interested in custom tags as well.

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• Implementing MVC pattern in SWT application

  - by Pradeep Simha

  I am developing an SWT application (it's basically an Eclipse plugin, so I need to use SWT). Currently my design is as follows: Model: In model, I have POJOs which represents the actual fields in views. View: It is a dumb layer, it contains just UI and contains no logic (not even event handlers) Controller: It acts as a mediator b/w those two layers. Also it is responsible for creating view layer, handling events etc. Basically I have created all of the controls in view as a static like this public static Button btnLogin and in controller I have a code like this: public void createLoginView(Composite comp) { LoginFormView.createView(comp); //This createView method is in view layer ie LoginFormView LoginFormView.btnLogin.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() { //Code goes here }); } Similalrly I have done for other views and controls. So that in main class and other classes I am calling just createLoginView of controller. I am doing similar thing for other views. So my question, is what I am doing is correct? Is this design good? Or I should have followed any other approach. Since I am new to SWT and Eclipse plugin development (basically I am Java EE developer having 4+ years of exp). Any tips/pointers would be appreciated.

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