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• Oracle Tutor: XPDL conversion (and why you should care)

  - by mary.keane

  You may have noticed that the Oracle Business Process Converter feature in Tutor 14 supports "XPDL" conversion to Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite (BPA), Oracle Business Process Management Suite (BPM), and Oracle Tutor, and you may have briefly wondered "what is XPDL?" before you moved on to the Visio import feature (a very popular feature in Tutor 14). This posting is for those who do not yet understand (or care) about XPDL and process modeling. Many of us (and I'm including myself) have spent years working in the process definition arena: we've written procedures, designed systems and software to help others write procedures, and have been responsible for embedding policies and procedures into training material for employees. We've worked with tools such as Oracle Tutor, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Word, and UPK. Most of us have never worked with "modeling tools" before, and we certainly never had to understand BPMN. It's a brave new world in this arena, and companies desperately need people with policy and procedural system expertise to be able to work with system analysts so there is a seamless transfer of knowledge from IT to employees. When working with applications, a picture is worth a thousand words, so eventually you're going to need to understand and be able to work with business process models. XPDL is an acronym for XML Process Definition Language, and it is an interchange format for business process models. It allows you to take a BPMN model that was developed in one workflow application such as BizAgi and import it into another workflow application or a true BPMN management system such as Oracle BPM. Specifically, the XPDL format contains the graphical information of a model as well as any executable information. By using a common format, models can be moved from a basic modeling application used by business owners to applications used by system architects. Over 80 applications support the XPDL format, including MetaStorm ProVision, BEA ALBPM, BizAgi, and Tibco. I mention these applications because we have provided XSLT mapping files specifically for these vendors. Oracle Business Process Converter was designed with user extensibility in mind, and thus users can add their own XML files so that additional XPDL models from other vendors can be converted to BPM, BPA, and Oracle Tutor. Instructions on how to add your own files can be found in Appendix 4 of the Oracle Business Converter manual. Let's take a visual look at how this works. Here is an example of a model devloped in BizAgi: This model can be created by the average business user without a large learning curve, and it's a good start for the system analyst who will be adding web services as well as for the business manager who manages the process described in the model. By exporting this model as XPDL, the information can be converted into Oracle BPA and Oracle BPM as well as converted to Oracle Tutor to become the framework for a procedure. Through this conversion feature, one graphic illustration of a business process can be used by a system analyst, business analyst, business manager, and employee, as seen below. Model Converted to Tutor Procedure Below is the task section of the procedure after conversion from an XPDL file. Model converted to BPA Model converted to BPM End users still want step by step instructions on how to perform their jobs, so procedures (Oracle Tutor) and application simulations (UPK) are still a critical piece of the solution. But IT professionals need graphic descriptions of how the applications work, regardless of whether there are any tasks involving humans. Now there is a way to convert procedures (Oracle Tutor docx files) and basic models (XPDL files) so that business managers and system analysts can share process information. References Wikipedia XPDL. Workflow Management Coalition, XPDL Support and Resources Oracle Business Process Converter manual, Oracle Tutor 14 Oracle Business Process Management 11g If you have any XPDL conversion stories to share, we'd love to hear from you. Best wishes for the coming new year, Mary Keane, Senior Development Manager, Oracle Tutor and BPM

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• Why is there no service-oriented language?

  - by Wolfgang

  Edit: To avoid further confusion: I am not talking about web services and such. I am talking about structuring applications internally, it's not about how computers communicate. It's about programming languages, compilers and how the imperative programming paradigm is extended. Original: In the imperative programming field, we saw two paradigms in the past 20 years (or more): object-oriented (OO), and service-oriented (SO) aka. component-based (CB). Both paradigms extend the imperative programming paradigm by introducing their own notion of modules. OO calls them objects (and classes) and lets them encapsulates both data (fields) and procedures (methods) together. SO, in contrast, separates data (records, beans, ...) from code (components, services). However, only OO has programming languages which natively support its paradigm: Smalltalk, C++, Java and all other JVM-compatibles, C# and all other .NET-compatibles, Python etc. SO has no such native language. It only comes into existence on top of procedural languages or OO languages: COM/DCOM (binary, C, C++), CORBA, EJB, Spring, Guice (all Java), ... These SO frameworks clearly suffer from the missing native language support of their concepts. They start using OO classes to represent services and records. This leads to designs where there is a clear distinction between classes that have methods only (services) and those that have fields only (records). Inheritance between services or records is then simulated by inheritance of classes. Technically, its not kept so strictly but in general programmers are adviced to make classes to play only one of the two roles. They use additional, external languages to represent the missing parts: IDL's, XML configurations, Annotations in Java code, or even embedded DSL like in Guice. This is especially needed, but not limited to, since the composition of services is not part of the service code itself. In OO, objects create other objects so there is no need for such facilities but for SO there is because services don't instantiate or configure other services. They establish an inner-platform effect on top of OO (early EJB, CORBA) where the programmer has to write all the code that is needed to "drive" SO. Classes represent only a part of the nature of a service and lots of classes have to be written to form a service together. All that boiler plate is necessary because there is no SO compiler which would do it for the programmer. This is just like some people did it in C for OO when there was no C++. You just pass the record which holds the data of the object as a first parameter to the procedure which is the method. In a OO language this parameter is implicit and the compiler produces all the code that we need for virtual functions etc. For SO, this is clearly missing. Especially the newer frameworks extensively use AOP or introspection to add the missing parts to a OO language. This doesn't bring the necessary language expressiveness but avoids the boiler platform code described in the previous point. Some frameworks use code generation to produce the boiler plate code. Configuration files in XML or annotations in OO code is the source of information for this. Not all of the phenomena that I mentioned above can be attributed to SO but I hope it clearly shows that there is a need for a SO language. Since this paradigm is so popular: why isn't there one? Or maybe there are some academic ones but at least the industry doesn't use one.

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• RPi and Java Embedded GPIO: Big Data and Java Technology

  - by hinkmond

  Java Embedded and Big Data go hand-in-hand, especially as demonstrated by prototyping on a Raspberry Pi to show how well the Java Embedded platform can perform on a small embedded device which then becomes the proof-of-concept for industrial controllers, medical equipment, networking gear or any type of sensor-connected device generating large amounts of data. The key is a fast and reliable way to access that data using Java technology. In the previous blog posts you've seen the integration of a static electricity sensor and the Raspberry Pi through the GPIO port, then accessing that data through Java Embedded code. It's important to point out how this works and why it works well with Java code. First, the version of Linux (Debian Wheezy/Raspian) that is found on the RPi has a very convenient way to access the GPIO ports through the use of Linux OS managed file handles. This is key in avoiding terrible and complex coding using register manipulation in C code, or having to program in a less elegant and clumsy procedural scripting language such as python. Instead, using Java Embedded, allows a fast way to access those GPIO ports through those same Linux file handles. Java already has a very easy to program way to access file handles with a high degree of performance that matches direct access of those file handles with the Linux OS. Using the Java API java.io.FileWriter lets us open the same file handles that the Linux OS has for accessing the GPIO ports. Then, by first resetting the ports using the unexport and export file handles, we can initialize them for easy use in a Java app. // Open file handles to GPIO port unexport and export controls FileWriter unexportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/unexport"); FileWriter exportFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/export"); ... // Reset the port unexportFile.write(gpioChannel); unexportFile.flush(); // Set the port for use exportFile.write(gpioChannel); exportFile.flush(); Then, another set of file handles can be used by the Java app to control the direction of the GPIO port by writing either "in" or "out" to the direction file handle. // Open file handle to input/output direction control of port FileWriter directionFile = new FileWriter("/sys/class/gpio/gpio" + gpioChannel + "/direction"); // Set port for input directionFile.write("in"); // Or, use "out" for output directionFile.flush(); And, finally, a RandomAccessFile handle can be used with a high degree of performance on par with native C code (only milliseconds to read in data and write out data) with low overhead (unlike python) to manipulate the data going in and out on the GPIO port, while the object-oriented nature of Java programming allows for an easy way to construct complex analytic software around that data access functionality to the external world. RandomAccessFile[] raf = new RandomAccessFile[GpioChannels.length]; ... // Reset file seek pointer to read latest value of GPIO port raf[channum].seek(0); raf[channum].read(inBytes); inLine = new String(inBytes); It's Big Data from sensors and industrial/medical/networking equipment meeting complex analytical software on a small constraint device (like a Linux/ARM RPi) where Java Embedded allows you to shine as an Embedded Device Software Designer. Hinkmond

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• Oracle GoldenGate Active-Active Part 1

  - by Nick_W

  My name is Nick Wagner, and I'm a recent addition to the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) product management team.  I've spent the last 15+ years working on database replication products, and I've spent the last 10 years working on the Oracle GoldenGate product.  So most of my posting will probably be focused on OGG.  One question that comes up all the time is around active-active replication with Oracle GoldenGate.  How do I know if my application is a good fit for active-active replication with GoldenGate?   To answer that, it really comes down to how you plan on handling conflict resolution.  I will delve into topology and deployment in a later blog, but here is a simple architecture: The two most common resolution routines are host based resolution and timestamp based resolution. Host based resolution is used less often, but works with the fewest application changes.  Think of it like this: any transactions from SystemA always take precedence over any transactions from SystemB.  If there is a conflict on SystemB, then the record from SystemA will overwrite it.  If there is a conflict on SystemA, then it will be ignored.  It is quite a bit less restrictive, and in most cases, as long as all the tables have primary keys, host based resolution will work just fine.  Timestamp based resolution, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In this case, you can decide which record is overwritten based on timestamps. For example, does the older record get overwritten with the newer record?  Or vice-versa?  This method not only requires primary keys on every table, but it also requires every table to have a timestamp/date column that is updated each time a record is inserted or updated on the table.  Most homegrown applications can always be customized to include these requirements, but it's a little more difficult with 3rd party applications, and might even be impossible for large ERP type applications.  If your database has these features - whether it’s primary keys for host based resolution, or primary keys and timestamp columns for timestamp based resolution - then your application could be a great candidate for active-active replication.  But table structure is not the only requirement.  The other consideration applies when there is a conflict; i.e., do I need to perform any notification or track down the user that had their data overwritten?  In most cases, I don't think it's necessary, but if it is required, OGG can always create an exceptions table that contains all of the overwritten transactions so that people can be notified. It's a bit of extra work to implement this type of option, but if the business requires it, then it can be done. Unless someone is constantly monitoring this exception table or has an automated process in dealing with exceptions, there will be a delay in getting a response back to the end user. Ideally, when setting up active-active resolution we can include some simple procedural steps or configuration options that can reduce, or in some cases eliminate the potential for conflicts.  This makes the whole implementation that much easier and foolproof.  And I'll cover these in my next blog. 

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• Concurrent Affairs

  - by Tony Davis

  I once wrote an editorial, multi-core mania, on the conundrum of ever-increasing numbers of processor cores, but without the concurrent programming techniques to get anywhere near exploiting their performance potential. I came to the.controversial.conclusion that, while the problem loomed for all procedural languages, it was not a big issue for the vast majority of programmers. Two years later, I still think most programmers don't concern themselves overly with this issue, but I do think that's a bigger problem than I originally implied. Firstly, is the performance boost from writing code that can fully exploit all available cores worth the cost of the additional programming complexity? Right now, with quad-core processors that, at best, can make our programs four times faster, the answer is still no for many applications. But what happens in a few years, as the number of cores grows to 100 or even 1000? At this point, it becomes very hard to ignore the potential gains from exploiting concurrency. Possibly, I was optimistic to assume that, by the time we have 100-core processors, and most applications really needed to exploit them, some technology would be around to allow us to do so with relative ease. The ideal solution would be one that allows programmers to forget about the problem, in much the same way that garbage collection removed the need to worry too much about memory allocation. From all I can find on the topic, though, there is only a remote likelihood that we'll ever have a compiler that takes a program written in a single-threaded style and "auto-magically" converts it into an efficient, correct, multi-threaded program. At the same time, it seems clear that what is currently the most common solution, multi-threaded programming with shared memory, is unsustainable. As soon as a piece of state can be changed by a different thread of execution, the potential number of execution paths through your program grows exponentially with the number of threads. If you have two threads, each executing n instructions, then there are 2^n possible "interleavings" of those instructions. Of course, many of those interleavings will have identical behavior, but several won't. Not only does this make understanding how a program works an order of magnitude harder, but it will also result in irreproducible, non-deterministic, bugs. And of course, the problem will be many times worse when you have a hundred or a thousand threads. So what is the answer? All of the possible alternatives require a change in the way we write programs and, currently, seem to be plagued by performance issues. Software transactional memory (STM) applies the ideas of database transactions, and optimistic concurrency control, to memory. However, working out how to break down your program into sufficiently small transactions, so as to avoid contention issues, isn't easy. Another approach is concurrency with actors, where instead of having threads share memory, each thread runs in complete isolation, and communicates with others by passing messages. It simplifies concurrent programs but still has performance issues, if the threads need to operate on the same large piece of data. There are doubtless other possible solutions that I haven't mentioned, and I would love to know to what extent you, as a developer, are considering the problem of multi-core concurrency, what solution you currently favor, and why. Cheers, Tony.

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• Can aptitude for learning Programming paradigms be influenced by culture or native language's gramma

  - by DVK

  It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion). I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference. That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented. To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons. Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience. E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively. I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation. I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion). I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.

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• Can you review my Perl rewrite of Cucumber?

  - by Evgeny

  There is a team working on acceptance testing X11 GUI application in our company, and they created a monstrous acceptance testing framework that drives the GUI as well as running scenarios. The framework is written using Perl 5, and scenario files look more like very complex Perl programs (thousands of lines long with procedural-programming style) than acceptance tests. I recently learned Ruby's Cucumber, and generally have been using Ruby for quite a lot of time. But unfortunately I can't just shove Ruby to replace Perl because the people who are writing all of this don't know Ruby and it's quite certain that they wont want "this" kind of interruption. So to bring Ruby's Cucumber a bit closer to their work, I rewrote it using Perl 5. Unfortunately I am really not a Perl programmer, and would love to get a code review and to hear suggestions from people who both know Perl and Cucumber. Hi Perl/Cucumber StackOverflow users - please help me create this "open source" attempt to re-create Cucumber for Perl! I would love to hear your comments and will accept any acceptable help. The minimal source code is here: http://github.com/kesor/p5-cucumber Thank you for your attention. For those not familiar with cucumber - please take just one small moment to take a look at this one small little page: http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber

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• Any way to pass parameters programmatically to an onclick function?

  - by RenderIn

  I have an onclick function which performs several tasks. In another javascript function I do not have access to the context variables needed to perform these tasks. To get around this I have been simply calling the onclick function directly. The problem I have now is that I'd like to perform a task after an Ajax action in the onclick completes. Is there any way for me to pass a function to the onclick method of a link? What would the onclick attribute look like? e.g. something like this: <a id="link3" href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="function(callback) { X(a); Y(b); Z(c, callback); };">click me</a> Clicking on this would pass "undefined" as the callback, while I could also call it explicitly like this: document.getElementById("link3").onclick(function() { alert("Completed all tasks"); } ); Is something like this possible? Basically I want to be able to pass an optional parameter to the onclick method, but if it's absent I want it to behave as if there were just procedural code in the onclick.

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• Disadvantage of OOP?

  - by Bragaadeesh

  Typically i dont want to know the specifics of the cons of OOPs, but it felt kind of weird when I had an argument at an interview I attended recently. The question that was posted to me was to tell me one disadvantage of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). At that time, I felt OOP to be the most matured level of programming after the procedural/functional models. So I replied to him that I dont see any negatives at all. But the interviewer said there are few and I asked him to list one if he does not mind. He gave an example that I cant digest well, he said that OOP pattern does not strictly implement inheritance rules and cited the satellite/rocket example where the body parts will disintegrate periodically to remove weight during rocket launch and said that inheritance does not support this. His example kind of felt very weird to me the reason being the application of inheritance to this example. Then I left the example aside and I had this doubt - Can we unplug class hierarchies in such a manner (I am kind of confident in Java its not possible) in an ideal Object Oriented Design?

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• Efficient Context-Free Grammar parser, preferably Python-friendly

  - by Max Shawabkeh

  I am in need of parsing a small subset of English for one of my project, described as a context-free grammar with (1-level) feature structures (example) and I need to do it efficiently . Right now I'm using NLTK's parser which produces the right output but is very slow. For my grammar of ~450 fairly ambiguous non-lexicon rules and half a million lexical entries, parsing simple sentences can take anywhere from 2 to 30 seconds, depending it seems on the number of resulting trees. Lexical entries have little to no effect on performance. Another problem is that loading the (25MB) grammar+lexicon at the beginning can take up to a minute. From what I can find in literature, the running time of the algorithm used to parse such a grammar (Earley or CKY) should be linear to the size of the grammar and cubic to the size of the input token list. My experience with NLTK indicates that ambiguity is what hurts the performance most, not the absolute size of the grammar. So now I'm looking for a CFG parser to replace NLTK. I've been considering PLY but I can't tell whether it supports feature structures in CFGs, which are required in my case, and the examples I've seen seem to be doing a lot of procedural parsing rather than just specifying a grammar. Can anybody show me an example of PLY both supporting feature structs and using a declarative grammar? I'm also fine with any other parser that can do what I need efficiently. A Python interface is preferable but not absolutely necessary.

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• Experience migrating legacy Cobol/PL1 to Java

  - by MadMurf

  ORIGINAL Q: I'm wondering if anyone has had experience of migrating a large Cobol/PL1 codebase to Java? How automated was the process and how maintainable was the output? How did the move from transactional to OO work out? Any lessons learned along the way or resources/white papers that may be of benefit would be appreciated. EDIT 7/7: Certainly the NACA approach is interesting, the ability to continue making your BAU changes to the COBOL code right up to the point of releasing the JAVA version has merit for any organization. The argument for procedural Java in the same layout as the COBOL to give the coders a sense of comfort while familiarizing with the Java language is a valid argument for a large organisation with a large code base. As @Didier points out the $3mil annual saving gives scope for generous padding on any BAU changes going forward to refactor the code on an ongoing basis. As he puts it if you care about your people you find a way to keep them happy while gradually challenging them. The problem as I see it with the suggestion from @duffymo to Best to try and really understand the problem at its roots and re-express it as an object-oriented system is that if you have any BAU changes ongoing then during the LONG project lifetime of coding your new OO system you end up coding & testing changes on the double. That is a major benefit of the NACA approach. I've had some experience of migrating Client-Server applications to a web implementation and this was one of the major issues we encountered, constantly shifting requirements due to BAU changes. It made PM & scheduling a real challenge. Thanks to @hhafez who's experience is nicely put as "similar but slightly different" and has had a reasonably satisfactory experience of an automatic code migration from Ada to Java. Thanks @Didier for contributing, I'm still studying your approach and if I have any Q's I'll drop you a line.

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• How to make Doxygen ignore specific PHP functions, when generating documentation from a purely proce

  - by Senthil

  I am writing a PHP Library and I am trying out Doxygen to generate the API documentation. My library does not use OOP. All code is procedural. I use lot of helper functions which have an _ (underscore) prefix in their names. They are not part of the publicly exposed API. They are just used internally. Even though they are commented just like the API functions, I don't want them included when giving out the documentation for the API. I want Doxygen to ignore these functions. I can think of two solutions for this, but I am not able to implement either one of them. First is, I can set some configuration in Doxygen to make it ignore specific function name patterns. I went through Doxygen help documentation and searched the web. There seems to be options to ignore file and folder name patterns. But I am not able to find an option to specify a function name pattern and make it ignore those functions. Second is, along with all the other content in the comments above functions, I could add some other keyword or something and make Doxygen ignore those functions. I haven't been able to find out how to do that either. How can I make Doxygen ignore specific PHP functions when generating documentation? Update I searched within Stack Overflow and came across this question. It looked similar to my question. I found out about EXCLUDE_SYMBOLS config option in one of the answers. You can use that to exclude function names too. More importantly, wildcards were supported. So I am able to ignore all my functions with _ as the prefix :) This ridiculous! I should've done more research :| Someone please delete this question or add this answer as an answer.

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• Data Access Layer, Best Practices

  - by labratmatt

  I'm looking for input on the best way to refactor the data access layer (DAL) in my PHP based web app. I follow an MVC pattern: PHP/HTML/CSS/etc. views on the front end, PHP controllers/services in the middle, and a PHP DAL sitting on top of a relational database in the model. Pretty standard stuff. Things are working fine, but my DAL is getting large (codesmell?) and becoming a bit unwieldy. My DAL contains almost all of the logic to interface with my database and is full of functions that look like this: function getUser($user_id) { $statement = "select id, name from users where user_id=:user_id"; PDO builds statement and fetchs results as an array return $array_of_results_generated_by_PDO_fetch_method; } Notes: The logic in my controller only interacts with the model using functions like the above in the DAL I am not using a framework (I'm of the opinion that PHP is a templating language and there's no need to inject complexity via a framework) I generally use PHP as a procedural language and tend to shy away from its OOP approach (I enjoy OOP development but prefer to keep that complexity out of PHP) What approaches have you taken when your DAL has reached this point? Do I have a fundamental design problem? Do I simply need to chop my DAL into a number of smaller files (logically divide it)? Thanks.

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• PHP syntax for referencing self with late static binding

  - by Chris

  When I learned PHP it was pretty much in procedural form, more recently I've been trying to adapt to the OOP way of doing things. Hoever the tutorials I've been following were produced before PHP 5.3 when late static binding was introduced. What I want to know is how do I reference self when calling a function from a parent class. For example these two methods were written for a User class which is a child of DatabaseObject. Right now they're sitting inside the User class, but, as they're used in other child classes of DatabaseObject I'd like to promote them to be included inside DatabaseObject. public static function find_all() { global $database; $result_set = self::find_by_sql("select * from ".self::$table_name); return $result_set; } and: protected function cleaned_attributes() { global $database; $clean_attributes = array(); foreach($this->attributes() as $key => $value) { $clean_attributes[$key] = $database->escape_value($value); } return $clean_attributes; } So I have three questions: 1) How do I change the self:: reference when I move it to the parent. Is it static:: or something similar? 2) When calling the function from my code do I call it in the same way, as a function of the child class eg User::find_all() or is there a change there also? 3) Is there anything else I need to know before I start chopping bits up?

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• What kinds of problems are most likely to occur? (question rewritten)

  - by ChrisC

  If I wrote 1) a C# SQL db app (a simple program consisting of a gui over some forms with logic for interfacing with the sql db) 2) for home use, that doesn't do any network communication 3) that uses a simple, reliable, and appropriate sql db 4) whose gui is properly separated from the logic 5) that has complete and dependable input data validation 6) that has been completely tested so that 100% of logic bugs were eliminated ... and then if the program was installed and run by random users on their random Windows computers Q1) What types of technical (non-procedural) problems and support situations are most likely to occur, and how likely are they? Q2) Are there more/other things I could do in the first place to prevent those problems and also minimize the amount of user support required? I know some answers will apply to my specific platforms (C#, SQL, Windows, etc) and some won't. Please be as specific as is possible. Mitch Wheat gave me some very valuable advice below, but I'm now offering the bounty because I am hoping to get a better picture of the kinds of things that I'm most reasonably likely to encounter. Thanks.

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• How Does MVC Handle Missing Data Requirements

  - by Don Bakke

  I'm teaching myself MVC concepts in hopes of applying them to a non-OO/procedural development environment. I am pretty sure I understand simple View - Request - Controller - Request - Model - Response - Controller - Response - View flow. What I am struggling with is understanding more complex scenarios. For instance, let's say I have a shopping cart form with a button for 'Calculate Shipping'. Normally a click on this button will follow the above flow. But what if there is missing data, like the zip code? Should the View verify this first and alert the user before making a 'Calculate Shipping' request? Or should the request be made and the Model returns a notification that critical data is missing? If the latter, does the Controller instruct the View to alert the user? What if I wanted to prompt the user for the missing zip code (perhaps in a popup input display) and then automatically request the 'Calculate Shipping' method again? I suppose this gets into the question of how smart a View ought to be. It seems that MVC has evolved due to richer UI and automation (such as with data-binding) and this muddies the water from a purist MVC perspective. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

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• OOP 101 - quick question.

  - by R Bennett

  I've used procedural for sometime now and trying to get a better understanding of OOP in Php. Starting at square 1 and I have a quick question ot get this to gel. Many of the basic examples show static values ( $bob-name = "Robert";) when assigning a value, but I want to pass values... say from a form ( $name = $_POST['name']; ) class Person { // define properties public $name; public $weight; public $age; public function title() { echo $this->name . " has submitted a request "; } } $bob = new Person; // want to plug the value in here $bob->name = $name; $bob->title(); I guess I'm getting a little hung up in some areas as far as accessing variables from within the class, encapsulation & "rules", etc., can $name = $_POST['name']; reside anywhere outside of the class or am I missing an important point? Thanks

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• Have I taken a wrong path in programming by being excessively worried about code elegance and style?

  - by Ygam

  I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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• tips for fixing bad coding/dev habits ?

  - by dfafa

  i want to become a better coder....so i have decided to sign up for computing science program...maybe a formal education can assist me. i started working on smaller projects to learn but currently i have really bad coding/dev habits which is hindering my productivity as the codebase increases.... i have highlighted them and perhaps someone could make suggestions (or redirect to resources) or a more efficient method. most stuff that i made in the past were web apps. i usually develop with putty + nano...i just love the minimalist feel i use winscp and develop directly on my private web server...too lazy to do it on localhost and upload it later. i dont use subversion control...which one do i need ? sometimes ctrl +z doesn't work well. when i run out of ideas for naming variable, i use swear words instead. i swear a lot when i get stuck....how to deal with anger issue ? my codes look ugly with comments everywhere. would rather use procedural coding finds "thinking" in OO difficult and time consuming i "write first think later". refactors code only if i am getting paid for it. dislikes configuring linux distro, Apache, MySQL, scaling, designing graphics and layouts. does not like writing tests likes working alone. does not like sharing codes. has an econ degree dislikes reading other people's code would rather write it on my own it seems my only true desire is to translate my ideas to a working prototype as fast as possible....it seems like i am very uninterested in the other details...could it be that i am not cut out to be a coder after all ? is going back to study comp sci a bad idea ?

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• How to debug PHP?

  - by NutMotion

  Anyone's been trying himself at object oriented programming ? Most probably every developer I guess:D I for one have never studied OO design patterns thoroughly, and trying to put it all together now does prove at times thrilling, and many times frustrating also. Even more so when trying to do it in : PHP! All-in-all, my boss asked me to add some Database persistence functions to her server, but most of all, she asked me to translate her already working procedural code into a working Object Oriented code. Here I am, still standing on my PHP OO project. I'm (already) fed up with this "file logging only" PHP capability. I believe there must be some (free or not too much expansive) PHP debugging utility ? I've heard about Zend Studio and PHPEd so far, which didn't quite do the trick for whatever reasons. WIRCW("Which I don't Remember Correctly Why" lol) What say yé? on debugging PHP ? Is there a tool that provides a good debug mode? what's more, don't forget I'm not speaking about the classical web Request/response model. Talking about a debugging facility which can enable you to trigger a web service (aka client request) and go into debug mode on the SOAP web service side. Thks for any input.

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• How can I generate the Rowland prime sequence idiomatically in J?

  - by Gregory Higley

  If you're not familiar with the Rowland prime sequence, you can find out about it here. I've created an ugly, procedural monadic verb in J to generate the first n terms in this sequence, as follows: rowland =: monad define result =. 0 $ 0 t =. 1 $ 7 while. (# result) < y do. a =. {: t n =. 1 + # t t =. t , a + n +. a d =. | -/ _2 {. t if. d > 1 do. result =. ~. result , d end. end. result ) This works perfectly, and it indeed generates the first n terms in the sequence. (By n terms, I mean the first n distinct primes.) Here is the output of rowland 20: 5 3 11 23 47 101 7 13 233 467 941 1889 3779 7559 15131 53 30323 60647 121403 242807 My question is, how can I write this in more idiomatic J? I don't have a clue, although I did write the following function to find the differences between each successive number in a list of numbers, which is one of the required steps. Here it is, although it too could probably be refactored by a more experienced J programmer than I: diffs =: monad : '}: (|@({.-2&{.) , $:@}.) ^: (1 < #) y'

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• PHP: MVC and Model

  - by Pirkka

  Hello I`ve been wondering this one thing about creating models. If I make for example Page model. Is it the both: It can retrieve one row from the table or all the rows. Somehow Im mixing the objects and the database. I have thought it like this: I would have to make a Page-class that would represent one row in the table. It also would have all the basic CRUD-methods. Then I would have to do a Pages-class (somekind of collection) that would retrieve rows from the table and instantiate a Page object from each row. Is this kind of weird? If someone could explain to me the idea of model throughout.. Im again confused. Maybe Im thinking the whole OOP too difficult.. And by the way this forum is great. Hopefully people will just understand my problems. Heh. I was a long time procedural style programmer and now in 3 months I have dived into OOP and MVC and PHP frameworks and I just get more excited day by day when I explore this stuff!

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• why is OOP hard for me?

  - by netrox

  I have trouble writing OOP in PHP... I understand the concept but I never create classes for my projects... mainly because it's often a small project and nothing complex. But when I read OOP, it seems more difficult to code than writing simple procedural statements. It also seems to take a lot of room as well with so many empty abstract classes and that can be easily lost in the land of objects... it's becoming like a junkyard to me. Also, I noticed that virtually all instructions on how to use OOP use "car" or "cat" or "dog" analogies. Hello... we're not dealing with animals or cars... we're dealing with windows or consoles. You can talk about analogies to death and I will never learn. What I want is see a code that's written to show how objects are created - not, "aCow-moo!" For example, I want to see a browser window object displaying say... three inputs. I want to see an "object" created to output a window with three inputs then I want to see how overriding works, like change the window object to display only two inputs instead of three inputs. I think that would make learning more easy, wouldn't it? Any recommended tutorials of that nature instead of quacks, moos, and woofs.

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• Are functional programming languages good for practical tasks?

  - by Clueless

  It seems to me from my experimenting with Haskell, Erlang and Scheme that functional programming languages are a fantastic way to answer scientific questions. For example, taking a small set of data and performing some extensive analysis on it to return a significant answer. It's great for working through some tough Project Euler questions or trying out the Google Code Jam in an original way. At the same time it seems that by their very nature, they are more suited to finding analytical solutions than actually performing practical tasks. I noticed this most strongly in Haskell, where everything is evaluated lazily and your whole program boils down to one giant analytical solution for some given data that you either hard-code into the program or tack on messily through Haskell's limited IO capabilities. Basically, the tasks I would call 'practical' such as Aceept a request, find and process requested data, and return it formatted as needed seem to translate much more directly into procedural languages. The most luck I have had finding a functional language that works like this is Factor, which I would liken to a reverse-polish-notation version of Python. So I am just curious whether I have missed something in these languages or I am just way off the ball in how I ask this question. Does anyone have examples of functional languages that are great at performing practical tasks or practical tasks that are best performed by functional languages?

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