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• Progressive Enhancement vs. Single Page Apps

  - by SeanPlusPlus

  I just got back from a conference in Boston called An Event Apart. A really popular theme amongst the speakers was the idea of progressive enhancement - a site's content should go in the HTML, and JavaScript should only be used to enhance behavior. The arguments that the speakers gave for progressive enhancement were very compelling. Not only is it a solid pattern for supporting older browsers, and devices on a network with low bandwidth, but HTML fails much more gracefully than JavaScript (i.e. markup that is not supported is just ignored, while if a browser throws an exception while executing your script - you are hosed). Jeremy Keith gave a particularly insightful talk about this. But what about single page web apps like Backbone and Angular? The whole design behind these frameworks seems to push the developer toward moving content out of the HTML, and into something like a JSON API. I can not seem to gel these two design patterns: progressive enhancement vs. single page web apps. Are there instances when one is better than the other? Or are they not even antagonistic technologies, and I am missing something here with my mental model?

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• Important Tips to make a user friendly Homepage

  - by Aditi

  We have done a lot of redesign work lately for many online businesses.. There are some basic things we want to stress into any web design which make it usable! Unfortunately most designers care about the graphic elements, clean code & navigation only. Most designers do not realize that a design they did could be a masterpiece to them but for a layman it could be tough to use. It is so very important to understand usability & call to action for any business and then implemented on their website Homepage. Showcase Offering The sole purpose of their websites needs to be mentioned on the homepage, what they are offering, why should one do business with them and why they are better than other competitors. Include a tag line under your logo that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does. Ease of Navigation Make it easier for your user to find what they are looking for, some archives, articles, services etc. A visible and easy to use Navigation allows just that. You may also want to feature some of the most visited content on the homepage itself. Search Form Let your users take advantage of a search form from your homepage, keep it visible enough so if they have trouble locating certain content using your navigation. The Search Bar will come handy in such situation. Especially if you have thousands and thousands of web pages. Liquid Layout There was a time when people used standard resolution, not any more. People have different screen sizes and most people now browse on handhelds. Try keeping liquid width so people can adjust as per their choice. First impression is last impression, leaving one through your perfect homepage can do wonders for your business.

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• Securing Back End API for Mobile Applications

  - by El Guapo

  I have an application that I am writing for both iOS and Android; this application will be served by a ReSTFUL API running on a cluster of servers on "the internets". I am curious how the rest of the world is going about securing their APIs so only specific applications running on iOS or Android can use these APIs. I could go the same route as other OAuth providers by providing a key/secret combination (2-legged OAuth), however, what do I do if I ever have to change these keys??? Do I create a new key/secret for every person that downloads the app??? The application is a social-based game that will allow the user to interact with other "participants" in the game based on location, achievements, etc. The API will provide the following functions: -Questions, Quests, etc -Profile Management -User Interaction -Possible Social Interaction Once the app gains traction I plan on opening up the API ala Facebook, Twitter, etc. Which is easy enough, I plan on implementing an OAuth Server and whatnot. However, I want to make sure, during this phase, that only people who are using the application can access and use the API.

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• Consistency of an object

  - by Stefano Borini

  I tend to keep my objects consistent during their lifetime. In some cases, setting up an object requires multiple calls to different routines. For example, a connection object may operate in this way: Connection c = new Connection(); c.setHost("http://whatever") c.setPort(8080) c.connect() please note this is just a stupid example to let you understand the point. In between calls to setHost and setPort the object is inconsistent, because the Port has not been specified yet, so this code would crash Connection c = new Connection(); c.setHost("http://whatever") c.connect() Meaning that it's a requisite for connect() to have previous calls to both setHost and setPort, otherwise it won't be able to operate as its state is inconsistent. You may fix the issue with a default value, but there may be cases where no sensible default may be devised. We assume in the later example that there's no default for the port, and therefore a call to c.connect() without first calling both setHost and setPort will be an inconsistent state of the object. This, to me, points at an incorrect interface design, but I may be wrong, so I want to hear your opinion. Do you organize your interface so that the object is always in a consistent (i.e. workable) state both before and after the call ? Edit: Please don't try to solve the problem I gave above. I know how to solve that. My question is much broader in sense. I am looking for a design principle, officially or informally stated, regarding consistency of object state between calls.

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• What are the boundaries between the responsibilities of a web designer and a web developer?

  - by Beofett

  I have been hired to do functional development for several web site redesigns. The company I work for has a relatively low technical level, and the previous development of the web sites were completed by a graphic designer who is self taught as far as web development is concerned. My responsibilities have extended beyond basic development, as I have been also tasked with creating the development environment, and migrating hosting from external CMS hosting to internal servers incorporating scripting languages (I opted for PHP/MySQL). I am working with the graphic designer, and he is responsible for the creative design of the web. We are running into a bit of friction over confusion between the boundaries of our respective tasks. For example, we had some differences of opinion on navigation. I was primarily concerned with ease-of-use (the majority of our userbase are not particularly web-savvy), as well as meeting W3 WAI standards (many of our users are older, and we have a higher than average proportion of users with visual impairment). His sole concern was what looked best for the website, and I felt that the direction he was pushing for caused some functional problems. I feel color choices, images, fonts, etc. are clearly his responsibility, and my expectation was that he would simply provide me with the CSS pages and style classes and IDs to use, but some elements of page layout also seem to fall more under the realm of "usability", which to me translates as near-synonymous with "functionality". I've been tasked with selecting the tools we'll use, which include frameworks, scripting languages, database design, and some open source applications (Moodle for example, and quite probably Drupal in the future). While these tools are quite customizable, working directly with some of the interfaces is beyond his familiarity with CSS, HTML, and PHP. This limits how much direct control he has over the appearance, which has lead to some discussion about the tool choices. Is there a generally accepted dividing line between the roles of a web designer and a web developer? Does his relatively inexperienced background in web technologies influence that dividing line?

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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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• How to Be a Software Engineer?

  - by Mistrio

  My problem is kind of weird so please bear with me. I have been working in a start up concerned basically with mobile development since my graduation 2 years ago. I develop apps for iOS but it's not really relevant. The start up structure is simply founders developers, with no middle-tier technical supervision or project management whatsoever. A typical project cycle of ours is like this: meet with a client send very vague recruitment to an outsourced graphics designer dig in development right after we get the design, no questions asked then improvise improvise improvise! It's not that we are unaware that stuff like requirements analysis, UML, design patterns, source code control, testing, development methodologies... etc. exist, we just simply don't use them, and I mean like never. The result is usually a clunk of hardly-maintainable yet working code. Despite everything we are literally flourishing with many successful apps on all platforms and bigger clients each project. The thing is, we want the chaos and we're looking for advice. How would you fix our company technically? Given that you can't hire project managers or team leaders just because we are barely 5 developers, so it wouldn't be a justified cost for the founders, but one-time things like courses, books, private training... etc is an option. Lastly, if it's relevant, we are based in Egypt. Thank you a lot in advance.

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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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• TDD - Outside In vs Inside Out

  - by Songo

  What is the difference between building an application Outside In vs building it Inside Out using TDD? These are the books I read about TDD and unit testing: Test Driven Development: By Example Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide: A Practical Guide Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests---This one was really hard to understand since JAVA isn't my primary language :) Almost all of them explained TDD basics and unit testing in general, but with little mention of the different ways the application can be constructed. Another thing I noticed is that most of these books (if not all) ignore the design phase when writing the application. They focus more on writing the test cases quickly and letting the design emerge by itself. However, I came across a paragraph in xUnit Test Patterns that discussed the ways people approach TDD. There are 2 schools out there Outside In vs Inside Out. Sadly the book doesn't elaborate more on this point. I wish to know what is the main difference between these 2 cases. When should I use each one of them? To a TDD beginner which one is easier to grasp? What is the drawbacks of each method? Is there any materials out there that discuss this topic specifically?

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• How to use the unit of work and repository patterns in a service oriented enviroment

  - by A. Karimi

  I've created an application framework using the unit of work and repository patterns for it's data layer. Data consumer layers such as presentation depend on the data layer design. For example a CRUD abstract form has a dependency to a repository (IRepository). This architecture works like a charm in client/server environments (Ex. a WPF application and a SQL Server). But I'm looking for a good pattern to change or reuse this architecture for a service oriented environment. Of course I have some ideas: Idea 1: The "Adapter" design pattern Keep the current architecture and create a new unit of work and repository implementation which can work with a service instead of the ORM. Data layer consumers are loosely coupled to the data layer so it's possible but the problem is about the unit of work; I have to create a context which tracks the objects state at the client side and sends the changes to the server side on calling the "Commit" (Something that I think the RIA has done for Silverlight). Here the diagram: ----------- CLIENT----------- | ------------------ SERVER ---------------------- [ UI ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Idea 2: Add another layer Add another layer (let say "local services" or "data provider"), then put it between the data layer (unit of work and repository) and the data consumer layers (like UI). Then I have to rewrite the consumer classes (CRUD and other classes which are dependent to IRepository) to depend on another interface. And the diagram: ----------------- CLIENT ------------------ | ------------------- SERVER --------------------- [ UI ] -> [ Local Services/Data Provider ] ---> [ Web Services ] -> [ UoW/Repository ] -> [DB] Please note that I have the local services layer on the current architecture but it doesn't expose the data layer functionality. In another word the UI layer can communicate with both of the data and local services layers whereas the local services layer also uses the data layer. | | | | | | | | ---> | Local Services | ---> | | | UI | | | | Data | | | | | | | ----------------------------> | |

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• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself: You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do. You can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include quality requirements. Sequence diagrams are a good description of how the software works as the call stack, but are very limited, and give a highly partial view of the overall system. Class diagrams are great for describing how the system is built, but are utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line: how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I need to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot, or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

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• How common is prototyping as the first stage of development?

  - by EpsilonVector

  I've been taking some software design courses in the past few semesters, and while I see the benefit in a lot of the formalism, I still feel like it doesn't tell me anything about the program itself. You can't tell how the program is going to operate from the Use Case spec, even though it discusses what the program can do, and you can't tell anything about the user experience from the requirements document, even though it can include QA requirements. ...sequence diagrams are as good a description of how the software works as the call stack, in other words- very limited, highly partial view of the overall system, and a class diagram is great for describing how the system is built, but is utterly useless in helping you figure out what the software needs to be. Where in all this formalism is the bottom line- how the program looks, operates, and what experience it gives? Doesn't it make more sense to design off of that? Isn't it better to figure out how the program should work via a prototype and strive to implement it for real? I know that I'm probably suffering from being taught engineering by theoreticians, but I got to ask, do they do this in the industry? How do people figure out what the program actually is, not what it should conform to? Do people prototype a lot? ...or do they mostly use the formal tools like UML and I just didn't get the hang of using them yet?

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• Testcase runner for parametrized testcases

  - by Razer

  Let me explain my situation. I'm planning a kind of test case runner for doing testcases on external devices, which are microcontroller based. Lets consider the devices: Device 1 Device 2 There exist a lot of test cases which can be run with one of the devices above. For example: Testcase 1 Testcase 2 The main reason that all the testcases can be run with any device is, that the testcases validates some standard and this software should be extensible for future devices. The testcases itself must be runnable with changing parameters. For example Testcase 1 does some Timing Verification the testcase needs as input parameter the datarate: 4800, 9600, 19200. Now hoping you understand the situation, let me explain my design questions. For implementing the test cases I thought about an Attribute based approach, like nunit does it. The more complicated problem is, how to define the parametrized testcases? Like this: Device 1: Testcase 1: datarate: 4800, 9600, 19200 Testcase 2: supply: 1, 2, 3 Device 2: Testcase 1: datarate: 9600, 19200, 38400 Testcase 2: supply: 3, 4, 5 How would you design such a framework? I've done a similar desin in python where I had for every device a XML containing the testcase definitions like: <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=4800/> <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=9600/> <Testcase="Testcase 1" datarate=19200/>

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• Designing web-based plugin systems correctly so they don't waste as many resources?

  - by Xeoncross

  Many CMS systems which rely on third parties for much of their code often build "plugin" or "hooks" systems to make it easy for developers to modify the codebase's actions without editing the core files. This usually means an Observer or Event design pattern. However, when you look at systems like wordpress you see that on every page they load some kind of bootstrap file from each of the plugin's folders to see if that plugin will need to run that request. Its this poor design that causes systems like wordpress to spend many extra MB's of memory loading and parsing unneeded items each page. Are there alternative ways to do this? I'm looking for ideas in building my own. For example, Is there a way to load all this once and then cache the results so that your system knows how to lazy-load plugins? In other words, the system loads a configuration file that specifies all the events that plugin wishes to tie into and then saves it for future requests? If that also performs poorly, then perhaps there is a special file-structure that could be used to make educated guesses about when certain plugins are unneeded to fullfil the request. Any ideas? If anyone wants an example of the "plugin" concept you can find one here.

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• Designing a plug-in system

  - by madflame991

  I'm working on a Java project and I would like to add a plug-in system. More precisely, I would like to let the user design his own module, pack it into a jar, leave it in a "plugins/" subfolder of my application and be done with it. I've managed to get a child classloader to instantiate objects of classes located in external jars, but now I'm facing a design dilemma: Say Joe makes a plug-in and he packs it in joeplugin.jar. I would really like Joe to have a class named "instantiation.Factory" and I would also like everyone to have this class with this exact location and name. (This factory class obviously implements a interface that I provide and through it I get what I want from the plug-in.) If Joe wouldn't be restricted in this way I would have to look into his entire jar for some class that implements my factory interface and I don't want to imagine how complicated things get. So my question is: should I enforce a strict naming convention for this single class? I have no idea how plug-in systems work.

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• Is creating a separate pool for each individual image created from a png appropriate?

  - by Panzercrisis

  I'm still possibly a little green about object-pooling, and I want to make sure something like this is a sound design pattern before really embarking upon it. Take the following code (which uses the Starling framework in ActionScript 3): [Embed(source = "/../assets/images/game/misc/red_door.png")] private const RED_DOOR:Class; private const RED_DOOR_TEXTURE:Texture = Texture.fromBitmap(new RED_DOOR()); private const m_vRedDoorPool:Vector.<Image> = new Vector.<Image>(50, true); . . . public function produceRedDoor():Image { // get a Red Door image } public function retireRedDoor(pImage:Image):void { // retire a Red Door Image } Except that there are four colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. So now we have a separate pool for each color, a separate produce function for each color, and a separate retire function for each color. Additionally there are several items in the game that follow this 4-color pattern, so for each of them, we have four pools, four produce functions, and four retire functions. There are more colors involved in the images themselves than just their predominant one, so trying to throw all the doors, for instance, in a single pool, and then changing their color properties around isn't going to work. Also the nonexistence of the static keyword is due to its slowness in AS3. Is this the right way to do things?

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• Is creating a separate pool for each individual png image in the same class appropriate?

  - by Panzercrisis

  I'm still possibly a little green about object-pooling, and I want to make sure something like this is a sound design pattern before really embarking upon it. Take the following code (which uses the Starling framework in ActionScript 3): [Embed(source = "/../assets/images/game/misc/red_door.png")] private const RED_DOOR:Class; private const RED_DOOR_TEXTURE:Texture = Texture.fromBitmap(new RED_DOOR()); private const m_vRedDoorPool:Vector.<Image> = new Vector.<Image>(50, true); . . . public function produceRedDoor():Image { // get a Red Door image } public function retireRedDoor(pImage:Image):void { // retire a Red Door Image } Except that there are four colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. So now we have a separate pool for each color, a separate produce function for each color, and a separate retire function for each color. Additionally there are several items in the game that follow this 4-color pattern, so for each of them, we have four pools, four produce functions, and four retire functions. There are more colors involved in the images themselves than just their predominant one, so trying to throw all the doors, for instance, in a single pool, and then changing their color properties around isn't going to work. Also the nonexistence of the static keyword is due to its slowness in AS3. Is this the right way to do things?

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• First Project a big one, How much should we charge?

  - by confuzzled

  Two of my cousins and I started a freelance computer repair/web design business just to make some money on the side during college, and received our first major web design project about three weeks ago. Now we've created websites before, but it was mostly for family businesses and have never really charged money, and most of the websites have been static, and don't really require a CMS. This project, however, was a big one (for us anyways). We created a news site that had several categories, we created the banners, we created a classifieds page (not a web app just something static that they control). Several links, a few graphical assets, CSS drop down menu, RSS feed from a different news site, weather, all the normal stuff you would find on a regular news site. On top of that we put in all the usual Joomla stuff (search, Jcomments, Jslide pictures, JCE, etc.). Then we uploaded the first 10 articles they gave us, and we are going to train them how to use Joomla. Now, at first we decided for 700 dollars. I assumed they just wanted a simple blog like website where they can upload articles. But then we had a meeting, and they asked for a lot more. Note: we did not hard code the template from scratch, but customized the gantry framework to fit their needs. We did code quite a bit however. I estimate that we put in about 50-60 hours in total. I'm wondering if 700 dollars is a bit low, this price is definitely not set in stone. Please keep in mind that this is our first project, and we are newbies, please be kind. Thank You!

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• What do you wish language designers paid attention to?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  The purpose of this question is not to assemble a laundry list of programming language features that you can't live without, or wish was in your main language of choice. The purpose of this question is to bring to light corners of languge design most language designers might not think about. So, instead of thinking about language feature X, think a little more philisophically. One of my biases, and perhaps it might be controversial, is that the softer side of engineering--the whys and what fors--are many times more important than the more concrete side. For example, Ruby was designed with a stated goal of improving developer happiness. While your opinions may be mixed on whether it delivered or not, the fact that was a goal means that some of the choices in language design were influenced by that philosophy. Please do not post: Syntax flame wars (I could care less whether you use whitespace [Python], keywords [Ruby], or curly braces [Java, C/C++, et. al.] to denote program blocks). That's just an implementation detail. "Any language that doesn't have feature X doesn't deserve to exist" type comments. There is at least one reason for all programming languages to exist--good or bad. Please do post: Philisophical ideas that language designers seem to miss. Technical concepts that seem to be poorly implemented more often than not. Please do provide an example of the pain it causes and if you have any ideas of how you would prefer it to function. Things you wish were in the platform's common library but seldom are. One the same token, things that usually are in a common library that you wish were not. Conceptual features such as built in test/assertion/contract/error handling support that you wish all programming languages would implement properly--and define properly. My hope is that this will be a fun and stimulating topic.

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• Making money from a custom built interpreter?

  - by annoying_squid

  I have been making considerable progress lately on building an interpreter. I am building it from NASM assembly code (for the core engine) and C (cl.exe the Microsoft compiler for the parser). I really don't have a lot of time but I have a lot of good ideas on how to build this so it appeals to a certain niche market. I'd love to finish this but I need to face reality here ... unless I can make some good monetary return on my investment, there is not a lot of time for me to invest. So I ask the following questions to anyone out there, especially those who have experience in monetizing their programs: 1) How easy is it for a programmer to make good money from one design? (I know this is vague but it will be interesting to hear from those who have experience or know of others' experiences). 2) What are the biggest obstacles to making money from a programming design? 3) For the parser, I am using the Microsoft compiler (no IDE) I got from visual express, so will this be an issue? Will I have to pay royalties or a license fee? 4) As far as I know NASM is a 2-clause BSD licensed application. So this should allow me to use NASM for commericial development unless I am missing something? It's good to know these things before launching into the meat and potatoes of the project.

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• Testing of visualization projects

  - by paxRoman

  We develop small to large visualization projects for different tasks and industries and sometimes while rewriting them a couple of times in the process we hit walls because we discover that we need to add a lot of code to support new requirements. Now we have established a design process that seems to work well (at least we reduced the development time for each new project quite a bit), but we're still left scratching our heads around this question: what exactly should we test when testing visualizations? If everything that we want to explore is on the screen (bounded visualizations)? If the data is ok - if data is valid (that's one of the nice things about visualizations you can spot errors in your datasets)? Usability? User interaction? Code quality? I can tell you for sure that a simple check of the code quality is certainly not enough! Is there a classic paper / book about how to test visualizations? Also do you happen to know about classic design patterns for visualizations (except the obvious ones like Pub-Sub)?

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• Is there a canonical source supporting "all-surrogates"?

  - by user61852

  Background The "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach is not present in Codd's Relational Model or any SQL Standard (ANSI, ISO or other). Canonical books seems to elude this restrictions too. Oracle's own data dictionary scheme uses natural keys in some tables and surrogate keys in other tables. I mention this because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design. PPDM (Professional Petroleum Data Management Association) recommend the same canonical books do: Use surrogate keys as primary keys when: There are no natural or business keys Natural or business keys are bad ( change often ) The value of natural or business key is not known at the time of inserting record Multicolumn natural keys ( usually several FK ) exceed three columns, which makes joins too verbose. Also I have not found canonical source that says natural keys need to be immutable. All I find is that they need to be very estable, i.e need to be changed only in very rare ocassions, if ever. I mention PPDM because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design too. The origins of the "all-surrogates" approach seems to come from recommendations from some ORM frameworks. It's true that the approach allows for rapid database modeling by not having to do much business analysis, but at the expense of maintainability and readability of the SQL code. Much prevision is made for something that may or may not happen in the future ( the natural PK changed so we will have to use the RDBMS cascade update funtionality ) at the expense of day-to-day task like having to join more tables in every query and having to write code for importing data between databases, an otherwise very strightfoward procedure (due to the need to avoid PK colisions and having to create stage/equivalence tables beforehand ). Other argument is that indexes based on integers are faster, but that has to be supported with benchmarks. Obviously, long, varying varchars are not good for PK. But indexes based on short, fix-length varchar are almost as fast as integers. The questions - Is there any canonical source that supports the "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach ? - Has Codd's relational model been superceded by a newer relational model ?

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• Web Services and code lists

  - by 0x0me

  Our team heavily discuss the issues how to handle code list in a web service definition. The design goal is to describe a provider API to query a system using various values. Some of them are catalogs resp. code lists. A catalog or code list is a set of key value pairs. There are different systems (at least 3) maintaining possibly different code lists. Each system should implement the provider API, whereas each system might have different code list for the same business entity eg. think of colors. One system know [(1,'red'),(2,'green')] and another one knows [(1,'lightgreen'),(2,'darkgreen'),(3,'red')] etc. The access to the different provider API implementations will be encapsulated by a query service, but there is already one candidate which might use at least one provider API directly. The current options to design the API discussed are: use an abstract code list in the interface definition: the web service interface defines a well known set of code list which are expected to be used for querying and returning data. Each API provider implementation has to mapped the request and response values from those abstract codelist to the system specific one. let the query component handle the code list: the encapsulating query service knows the code list set of each provider API implementation and takes care of mapping the input and output to the system specific code lists of the queried system. do not use code lists in the query definition at all: Just query code lists by a plain string and let the provider API implementation figure out the right value. This might lead to a loose of information and possibly many false positives, due to the fact that the input string could not be canonical mapped to a code list value (eg. green - lightgreen or green - darkgreen or both) What are your experiences resp. solutions to such a problem? Could you give any recommendation?

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• Looking for a better Factory pattern (Java)

  - by Sam Goldberg

  After doing a rough sketch of a high level object model, I am doing iterative TDD, and letting the other objects emerge as a refactoring of the code (as it increases in complexity). (That whole approach may be a discussion/argument for another day.) In any case, I am at the point where I am looking to refactor code blocks currently in an if-else blocks into separate objects. This is because there is another another value combination which creates new set of logical sub-branches. To be more specific, this is a trading system feature, where buy orders have different behavior than sell orders. Responses to the orders have a numeric indicator field which describes some event that occurred (e.g. fill, cancel). The combination of this numeric indicator field plus whether it is a buy or sell, require different processing buy the code. Creating a family of objects to separate the code for the unique handling each of the combinations of the 2 fields seems like a good choice at this point. The way I would normally do this, is to create some Factory object which when called with the 2 relevant parameters (indicator, buysell), would return the correct subclass of the object. Some times I do this pattern with a map, which allows to look up a live instance (or constructor to use via reflection), and sometimes I just hard code the cases in the Factory class. So - for some reason this feels like not good design (e.g. one object which knows all the subclasses of an interface or parent object), and a bit clumsy. Is there a better pattern for solving this kind of problem? And if this factory method approach makes sense, can anyone suggest a nicer design?

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