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• Distinction between API and frontend-backend

  - by Jason

  I'm trying to write a "standard" business web site. By "standard", I mean this site runs the usual HTML5, CSS and Javascript for the front-end, a back-end (to process stuff), and runs MySQL for the database. It's a basic CRUD site: the front-end just makes pretty whatever the database has in store; the backend writes to the database whatever the user enters and does some processing. Just like most sites out there. In creating my Github repositories to begin coding, I've realized I don't understand the distinction between the front-end back-end, and the API. Another way of phrasing my question is: where does the API come into this picture? I'm going to list some more details and then questions I have - hopefully this gives you guys a better idea of what my actual question is, because I'm so confused that I don't know the specific question to ask. Some more details: I'd like to try the Model-View-Controller pattern. I don't know if this changes the question/answer. The API will be RESTful I'd like my back-end to use my own API instead of allowing the back-end to cheat and call special queries. I think this style is more consistent. My questions: Does the front-end call the back-end which calls the API? Or does the front-end just call the API instead of calling the back-end? Does the back-end just execute an API and the API returns control to the back-end (where the back-end acts as the ultimate controller, delegating tasks)? Long and detailed answers explaining the role of the API alongside the front-end back-end are encouraged. If the answer depends on the model of programming (models other than the Model-View-Controller pattern), please describe these other ways of thinking of the API. Thanks. I'm very confused.

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• checking for collision detection

  - by bill

  I am trying to create a game where you have a player and you can move right,left, and jump. kind of like mario but its not a side scroller. also i want to use 2d array to make a tile map. my big problem is that i dont understand how to check for collision. i spend about 2 week thinking about this and i came up with 2 solution but they both have problems. let say my map is: 0 = sky 1 = player 2 = ground 00000 10002 22022 Solution 1: move the '1'(player) and update the map less say player wants to move right, then x+=grid[x+1][y] this make the collision easy bc you can just check if if(grid[x][y+1] == 2){ //player is standing on top of ground } problem with this when u hit right key player will move (x*Titlewidth) to right. and as you can see the animation wont look smooth. Solution 2: move player and dont update map player_x += 2 this will make the animation more smoother bc i am just moving 2 pixels. problem1: i cant update map bc if player some times will be middle of int(2d array). but thats ok sinces its not a side scroller so updating the map is not a big deal. problem2: only way to check for collision is to use java intersection method. but then player have to be atleast 1 or 2 pixel in ground in order to check for collision. and as you can see that wont look good too. plz note this is my first collision game in java. so plz try to explain alot otherwise i wont understand it.

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• Distributed transactions and queues, ruby, erlang

  - by chrispanda

  I have a problem that involves several machines, message queues, and transactions. So for example a user clicks on a web page, the click sends a message to another machine which adds a payment to the user's account. There may be many thousands of clicks per second. All aspects of the transaction should be fault tolerant. I've never had to deal with anything like this before, but a bit of reading suggests this is a well known problem. So to my questions. Am I correct in assuming that secure way of doing this is with a two phase commit, but the protocol is blocking and so I won't get the required performance? It appears that DBs like redis and message queuing system like Rescue, RabbitMQ etc don't really help me a lot - even if I implement some sort of two phase commit, the data will be lost if redis crashes because it is essentially memory-only. All of this has led me to look at erlang - but before I wade in and start learning a new language, I would really like to understand better if this is worth the effort. Specifically, am I right in thinking that because of its parallel processing capabilities, erlang is a better choice for implementing a blocking protocol like two phase commit, or am I confused?

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• Styles of games that work at low-resolution

  - by Brendan Long

  I'm taking a class on compilers, and the goal is to write a compiler for Meggy Jr devices (Arduino). The goal is just to make a simple compilers with loops and variables and stuff. Obviously, that's lame, so the "real goal" is to make an impressive game on the device. The problem is that it only has 64 pixels to work with (technically 72, but the top 8 are single-color and not part of the main display, so they're really only useful for displaying things like money). My problem is thinking of something to do on a device that small. It doesn't really matter if it's original, but it can't be something that's already available. My first idea was "snake", but that comes with the SDK. Same with a side-scrolling shooter. Remaining ideas include a tower defense game (hard to write, hard to control), an RPG (same), tetris (lame).. The problem is that all of the games I like require a high-resolution screen because they have a lot of text. Even a really simple game like nethack would be hard because each creature would be a single color. tl;dr What styles of games require a. No text; and b. Few enough objects that representing them each with a single color is acceptable? EDIT: To clarify, the display is 8x8 for a total of 64 pixels, not 64x64.

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• What type of career path / jobs for a developer to have best work life balance?

  - by programmx10

  I know some people may look down on a question like this but I've been thinking lately a lot about what direction I can take my career to have a good work life balance, since I have been working for a startup where hours tend to drag on, etc and I find it often drains the life out of me. I have been going to interviews and some other companies are also startups / new companies and seem to have a similar attitude about working long hours. Maybe its the technologies I use, the type of development, I don't know but I'm curious if anyone can offer advice on what a path is to be a programmer / developer but work for a company that respects a regular work week and would only rarely find the need to move past this. I realize this won't lead to being the highest paid in my field but I'm ok with that and feel the tradeoff would be worth it as it would also give me time for my own projects, etc. I know some people may say this is too general but I believe it is a programmer specific question because I believe there tends to be a higher than average rate of working overtime, etc and people working in "startup" venture situations than in many other fields and there is definitely a mindset among a lot of people in the field of working long hours that doesn't exist in every industry.

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• New York Alt.NET Dinner

  - by Liam McLennan

  While I was in the New York area Stephen Bohlen graciously organised an Alt.NET dinner. I left Rockville Centre on the 17:15 train, thinking I had plenty of time to get to Toloache Mexican Bistro on W 50th St. However, when I changed at Penn Station I took the service downtown, instead of uptown. I corrected that mistake and made it to 51st St, but then ended up in completely the wrong place because I did not understand the street numbering system. For future reference I now have the following rules for NYC navigation: Uptown means North, Downtown means South Streets run East-West, Avenues North-South Street number are symmetrical on the 5th Avenue axis. That is, street numbers increase from zero both east and west of 5th Av. Having gotten totally confused I called Steve, who helped me find the restaurant. I still had my luggage, which we stowed in a corner. Over some descent Mexican food we had some great discussions about Alt.NET, the 2010 conference, and other things of interest to Alt.NET folks. Thanks to Steve for organising and to all the guys who turned up.

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• SAP or Navision? Career Path

  - by codebased

  This could be tricky to ask; I may or may not ask this question here but I thought to give it a try. I've been in Software Industry since 2002 and now it has been a time that I'm at Senior level where I normally code, lead and define the architect; giving technical solutions to the management is one of my asset that I've earned during my services. Now it is the time to define the road map for the future, $$$. I am not in favor of Project Management roles. I've been thinking of going through the ERP and my current company does provide me an option to go for Navision/ Microsoft Dynamics. They are currently on 4.0 but they are planning to move for 2009 and also to build one of their own plug-in. Indeed the option is good because Microsoft is trying to accomplish the market for Dynamics products. However, they have less success in Australia. Now, Another option is with SAP where person can go with 200 K $ a year. Where as I'd doubt that if the same kind of growth, financial, is available for Microsoft geek. What is your opinion on Navision or SAP? If I try to completely move to SAP it could be bit challenging as market will consider me a fresher. However the return is quite good. Where in case of Microsoft, I think technology changes so fast that there is a less chance to grow in, within, the same experience; in other word, if any new framework comes in .net then market look for that person who knows this new framework and not .net But in case of SAP, where the base remain same and chances are to grab more money from the market. What would you do if you were me? In stackoverflow - Navision questions are 20+ where in SAP 200+///?? :-)

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• Styles of games that work at low-resolution

  - by Brendan Long

  I'm taking a class on compilers, and the goal is to write a compiler for Meggy Jr devices (Arduino). The goal is just to make a simple compilers with loops and variables and stuff. Obviously, that's lame, so the "real goal" is to make an impressive game on the device. The problem is that it only has 64 pixels to work with (technically 72, but the top 8 are single-color and not part of the main display, so they're really only useful for displaying things like money). My problem is thinking of something to do on a device that small. It doesn't really matter if it's original, but it can't be something that's already available. My first idea was "snake", but that comes with the SDK. Same with a side-scrolling shooter. Remaining ideas include a tower defense game (hard to write, hard to control), an RPG (same), tetris (lame).. The problem is that all of the games I like require a high-resolution screen because they have a lot of text. Even a really simple game like nethack would be hard because each creature would be a single color. tl;dr What styles of games require a. No text; and b. Few enough objects that representing them each with a single color is acceptable?

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• Blur gets displaced compared to original image

  - by user1294203

  I have implemented a SSAO and I'm using a blur step to smooth it out. The problem is that the blurred texture is slightly displaced compared to the original. I'm blurring using a 4x4 kernel since that was my noise kernel in SSAO. The following is the blurring shader: float result = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++){ for(int j = 0; j < 4; j++){ vec2 offset = vec2(TEXEL_SIZE.x * i, TEXEL_SIZE.y * j); result += texture(aoSampler, TexCoord + offset).r; } } out_AO = vec4(vec3(0.0), result * 0.0625); Where TEXEL_SIZE is one over my window resolution. I was thinking that this is was an error based on how OpenGL counts the Texel center, so I tried displacing the texture coordinate I was using by 0.5 * TEXEL_SIZE, but there was still a slight displacement. The texture input to my blur shader, has wrap parameters: glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP); When I tell the blur shader to just output the the value of the pixel, the result is not displaced, so it must have something to do with how neighboring pixels are sampled. Any thoughts?

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• Best Persistence choice for J2EE-App with frequently changing Data Model

  - by Ben-G

  Whenever I develop a J2EE-Application, I at some point decide to switch from my dummy Persistence (Simply Using Lists and other Data Structures) to some Sort of Database Persistence. Mostly when I hope the Data Model is more or less complete. From this point on, changes to the data model become exhausting, but unluckily they occur rather often. I've used different Object-Relational-Mappers (iBatis, Hibernate) for my projects. They definitely reduce the pain coming with Data Model changes, but they anyway let me adjust code/configuration at 3 or 4 places for every single change. To me, that's cumbersome and error prone. I made a better experience with DB4O, which simply persists Java Objects as they are, but I believe it's performance does not scale for huge applications. Is there anyway to maintain performance while letting out all the ugly configuration work? I'm seeking a performant framework which really hides persistence from my code. Wish for thinking? Or am I missing out THE technology? Hope you can help.

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• What should every programmer know about web development?

  - by Joel Coehoorn

  What things should a programmer implementing the technical details of a web application before making the site public? If Jeff Atwood can forget about HttpOnly cookies, sitemaps, and cross-site request forgeries all in the same site, what important thing could I be forgetting as well? I'm thinking about this from a web developer's perspective, such that someone else is creating the actual design and content for the site. So while usability and content may be more important than the platform, you the programmer have little say in that. What you do need to worry about is that your implementation of the platform is stable, performs well, is secure, and meets any other business goals (like not cost too much, take too long to build, and rank as well with Google as the content supports). Think of this from the perspective of a developer who's done some work for intranet-type applications in a fairly trusted environment, and is about to have his first shot and putting out a potentially popular site for the entire big bad world wide web. Also, I'm looking for something more specific than just a vague "web standards" response. I mean, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS over HTTP are pretty much a given, especially when I've already specified that you're a professional web developer. So going beyond that, Which standards? In what circumstances, and why? Provide a link to the standard's specification.

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• how do I write a functional spec quickly and efficiently

  - by giddy

  So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but Im looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. Im the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made something this serious, I started out writing something like a bad spec, an overview of some sorts, and it has wasted a LOT of my time. Ive also made 3 mockup-kinda-thingies for my client so I have a good understanding of what they want. Also released a preview (a throw away working app with the most basic workflow), and Ive only written and tested some of the very core/base systems. I think the mistake Ive been making so far is not writing a detailed spec, so Im getting to it now. So the whole thing comprises of An MVC website (for admins & data viewing) 2 Silverlight modules (For 2 specific tasks) 1 Desktop Application Im totally short on time, resources and need to get this done quick, also, need to make sure these guys read it up equally quick and painlessly. So how do I go about it, Im looking for any tips, any real world stuff, how do you guys usually do it? Do you make a mock screenie of every dialog/form/page? Im thinking of making a dummy asp.net web forms project, then filling in html files in folders and making it look like my mvc url structure. Then having a section in the spec for the website and write up a page for every URL Ive got with a screenie. For my win forms app, Ive made somewhat of a demo Win Form project, would I then put in a dialog or stucture everything as I would in the real app and then screen shot it?

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• Performance due to entity update

  - by Rizzo

  I always think about 2 ways to code the global Step() function, both with pros and cons. Please note that AIStep is just to provide another more step for whoever who wants it. // Approach 1 step foreach( entity in entities ) { entity.DeltaStep( delta_time ); if( time_for_fixed_step ) entity.FixedStep(); if( time_for_AI_step ) entity.AIStep(); ... // all kind of updates you want } PRO: you just have to iterate once over all entities. CON: fidelity could be lower at some scenarios, since the entity.FixedStep() isn't going all at a time. // Approach 2 step foreach( entity in entities ) entity.DeltaStep( delta_time ); if( time_for_fixed_step ) foreach( entity in entities ) entity.FixedStep(); if( time_for_AI_step ) foreach( entity in entities ) entity.FixedStep(); // all kind of updates you want SEPARATED PRO: fidelity on FixedStep is higher, shouldn't be much time between all entities update, rather than Approach 1 where you may have to wait other updates until FixedStep() comes. CON: you iterate once for each kind of update. Also, a third approach could be a hybrid between both of them, something in the way of foreach( entity in entities ) { entity.DeltaStep( delta_time ); if( time_for_AI_step ) entity.AIStep(); // all kind of updates you want BUT FixedStep() } if( time_for_fixed_step ) { foreach( entity in entities ) { entity.FixedStep(); } } Just two loops, don't caring about time fidelity in nothing other than at FixedStep(). Any thoughts on this matter? Should it really matters to make all steps at once or am I thinking on problems that don't exist?

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• Game Trees Conceptual Question

  - by Chris Corbin

  I am struggling to conceptually understand a question in a programming assignment for an algorithms class. The problem is dealing with a fictitious 2 player game, named Easy. The rules of the game are simple; each player may chose one of 4 integers {0-3} after which that integer is not available for the other player. The catch is, a player picks {0} it means they quit. The objective is for Player 1 to get {1} and Player 2 to get {2}, in which case they may win, however if both or neither succeed, then the game ends in a draw. I have been asked to draw the game tree for Easy, showing all nodes, which they explained as 4! = 24. Labeling the edges, which represent moves (selecting a number) and the leaves with who won (1 means Player 1 won, -1 means Player 2 won, and 0 means a tie). I have drawn out a game tree, which I believe is correct, however I am not 100% certain hence I am asking the question. My game tree only has 16 leaves. I am thinking that when a player picks {0}, and then quits, the game tree stops there? I don't see how it is possible to get to 24 leaves? Any help would be greatly appreciate, and if you need more information I would be happy to provide it. Thanks

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• How to go from mainstream to indie development?

  - by Salano Software

  I'm currently working as a game programmer for a AAA-level developer and publisher - which falls into the 'nice problem to have' category, I know, except that I'm growing more and more disenchanted with the direction of both the company and the AAA portion of the industry as a whole. I don't see any games on the studio's calendar for the next several years that I'm actually interested in working on; it looks like a continuing parade of sequels, license extensions and largely-derivative work. Which isn't to say that there won't be interesting things to do on those projects; but more and more I find myself wanting to do something fundamentally different. It seems like the market's never been better for smaller-scale projects, and I'd love to jump into that (and I've done small demos for Android and have started digging into iOS), but I obviously can't put anything out while I'm working for the company, and I'm concerned that I shouldn't even do substantial development in my spare time on anything I'd eventually like to release on my own. At the same time, I'm leery of leaving the job I've got for hopefully-obvious reasons, especially without a specific plan in place. Has anyone out there got experience with 'going indie' out of a mainstream job, and does anyone have specific suggestions as to what the best approach is and what I should specifically be thinking about or be careful of?

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• What functionality of an iPad can I use with Ubuntu?

  - by Andrew Ferrier

  What functionality of an iPad can I use with Ubuntu? I'm thinking about buying an iPad, but I only have Ubuntu PCs these days (no Windows, no Mac), and I'm nervous that it may be too reliant on the existence of iTunes. I'm less concerned about getting media onto and off it (and I have read that I can do this with libimobiledevice), but will I be able to activate it with iTunes? Does it need to be USB synced on a regular basis, or can I do most anything I want through the cloud (i.e. over wifi)? Edit: In answer to jrgifford's question, in theory, I'd like to do everything I would want to do with it were I using Windows/Mac. But more specifically, I think I'd want to: "Activate" it, if that's necessary Copy music / video onto it Install apps How much of this can I do without a Windows/Mac PC? Is it necessary to activate it? I don't think I'm that interested in backing it up (what would I back up?), but then again, maybe I'm confused as to how easy it is to get data on and off. Can I get a regular SFTP app for the iPad to copy data to my Ubuntu machine over wi-fi, for example?

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• Google music search: a better way to listen.

  - by anirudha

  somebody who want to listen music  pay much more to some online music store for online listening. otherwise they experience bad or low quality on YouTube. who is illegal  because uploader not have a permission or right to upload the document and their is no guarantee that they not put their ads or quality as same. now forget YouTube and all other because Google music search is much better just go their search the song by movies name or song and just click and listen. the quality is much better then other but it is not Google. the result they put comes from other website. i feel a thing goes wrong in Google music  search  that if i search “sajda” they never show me result about “sadka” because the word in common life use as same both. but the song may be starting from  “sajda” or “sadka”. i thing that they put the link that Do you means “Sadka” when i search sajda that it is better thing just like many online book store show the different keyword related to your keyword when you search their. like you search for a book on online book store they show you some different keyword when they serve the result and show related product or books when you go to a product page. after thinking all it is a better option for user to feel a better quality music without search hassle.

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• Can thousands of backlinks from the same site harm PageRank?

  - by Dejan Pelzel

  I just noticed that one particular site has almost 7000 backlinks linking back to our website. The site is something like a news aggregator and for each post they created around 20 (sometimes much more) backlinks back to our page and they basically linked over 400 pages. I am beginning to get concerned that this amount of links might harm our page. They seem to have more backlinks to our page than all the other pages combined and more backlinks that our website has pages. We have seen a massive negative effect going on for quite a while and the PageRank seems to have dropped to None (Not even 0). But I am not sure when and why exactly that happened seeing that PageRank updates take quite a while to appear. The site linking to us is otherwise pretty reputable and doesn't seem to be having any problems with their rank. (PR 6 actually) I was thinking of using the Google disavow tool for this site, but I don't want to make things even worse. Do you think these are harmful? If so, how do I fix this? Thanks :)

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• SQL SERVER – What is the Maximum Relational Database Size Supported by Single Instance?

  - by Pinal Dave

  I often get asked following question? “How much data SQL Server can handle?” Every single time when I get this question – I ask back following question - “How much data your storage system can handle?” The reason I ask this question back is because in reality for enterprise systems the limitation of storage is no more an issue. The Matter of the fact most of the database is now a days limited by the size of the storage system. SQL Server is enterprise system and it is very mature product. Even though if you still want to know what is the actual limit here is the answer. SQL Server 2008R2, 2012 and 2014 have maximum capacity of 524 PB (Petabyte) in the Enterprise, BI and Standard edition. SQL Server Express has a limitation of 10 GB due to its nature. I guess, now when you look at my question it will make sense that it is all depending on the size of your storage system. I personally believe at this point of time 524 PB is quite a huge data, but we never know after 10 years when we read this blog post, we all may think what was I thinking actually. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 20 for June 10-16, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The top 20 most popular items shared via my social networks for the week of June 10-16, 2012. DevOps: Evolving to Handle Disruption | JP Morgenthal The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates | Hernan Capdevila If you aren't among those finding bugs you might be among those complaining about them later | Markus Eisele ODTUG Kscope12 - June 24-28 - San Antonio, TX It's Alive! - The Oracle OpenWorld Content Catalog URGENT BULLETIN: Disable JRE Auto-Update for All E-Business Suite End-Users Aetna Dumps Its Siloed Enterprise Architecture for SOA | Stephanie Overby Condos and Clouds: Thinking about Cloud Computng by Looking at Condominiums | Pat Helland 5 minutes or less: Indexing Attributes in OID | Andre Correa Whole Lotta Virtualization Goin' On | Rick Ramsey The Road to a Cloud-Enabled, Infinitely Elastic Application Infrastructure | Andy Butler, Massimo Pezzini Migrating C/C++ embedded SQL code | Tom Laszewski Catching Up to Mobile Computing | Bob Rhubart Duke's Choice Award Nominations Close Friday! | Tori Wieldt Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA BI Architecture Master Class for Partners - Oracle Architecture Unplugged ADF Tutorial Chapter 1: Introduction | Yannick Ongena OPN: Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in July in Lisbon and Munich Networking in VirtualBox | The Fat Bloke 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco Thought for the Day "If the mind really is the finest computer, then there are a lot of people out there who need to be rebooted." — Tim Bryce Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Should I pick up a functional programming language?

  - by Statement

  I have recently been more concerned about the way I write my code. After reading a few books on design patterns (and overzealous implementation of them, I'm sure) I have shifted my thinking greatly toward encapsulating that which change. I tend to notice that I write less interfaces and more method-oriented code, where I love to spruce life into old classes with predicates, actions and other delegate tasks. I tend to think that it's often the actions that change, so I encapsulate those. I even often, although not always, break down interfaces to a single method, and then I prefer to use a delegate for the task instead of forcing client code to create a new class. So I guess it then hit me. Should I be doing functional programming instead? Edit: I may have a misconception about functional programming. Currently my language of choice is C#, and I come from a C++ background. I work as a game developer but I am currently unemployed. I have a great passion for architecture. My virtues are clean, flexible, reusable and maintainable code. I don't know if I have been poisoned by these ways or if it is for the better. Am I having a refactoring fever or should I move on? I understand this might be a question about "use the right tool for the job", but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Should I pick up a functional language? One of my fear factors is to leave the comfort of Visual Studio.

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• How to design highly scalable web services in Java?

  - by Kshitiz Sharma

  I am creating some Web Services that would have 2000 concurrent users. The services are offered for free and are hence expected to get a large user base. In the future it may be required to scale up to 50,000 users. There are already a few other questions that address the issue like - Building highly scalable web services However my requirements differ from the question above. For example - My application does not have a user interface, so images, CSS, javascript are not an issue. It is in Java so suggestions like using HipHop to translate PHP to native code are useless. Hence I decided to ask my question separately. This is my project setup - Rest based Web services using Apache CXF Hibernate 3.0 (With relevant optimizations like lazy loading and custom HQL for tune up) Tomcat 6.0 MySql 5.5 My questions are - Are there alternatives to Mysql that offer better performance for what I'm trying to do? What are some general things to abide by in order to scale a Java based web application? I am thinking of putting my Application in two tomcat instances with httpd redirecting the request to appropriate tomcat on basis of load. Is this the right approach? Separate tomcat instances can help but then database becomes the bottleneck since both applications access the same database? I am a programmer not a Db Admin, how difficult would it be to cluster a Mysql database (or, to cluster whatever database offered as an alternative to 1)? How effective are caching solutions like EHCache? Any other general best practices? Some clarifications - Could you partition the data? Yes we could but we're trying to avoid it. We need to run a lot of data mining algorithms and the design would evolve over time so we can't be sure what lines of partition should be there.

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• Is Linq having a mind-numbing effect on .NET programmers?

  - by Aaronaught

  A lot of us started seeing this phenomenon with jQuery about a year ago when people started asking how to do absolutely insane things like retrieve the query string with jQuery. The difference between the library (jQuery) and the language (JavaScript) is apparently lost on many programmers, and results in a lot of inappropriate, convoluted code being written where it is not necessary. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I swear I'm starting to see an uptick in the number of questions where people are asking to do similarly insane things with Linq, like find ranges in a sorted array. I can't get over how thoroughly inappropriate the Linq extensions are for solving that problem, but more importantly the fact that the author just assumed that the ideal solution would involve Linq without actually thinking about it (as far as I can tell). It seems that we are repeating history, breeding a new generation of .NET programmers who can't tell the difference between the language (C#/VB.NET) and the library (Linq). What is responsible for this phenomenon? Is it just hype? Magpie tendencies? Has Linq picked up a reputation as a form of magic, where instead of actually writing code you just have to utter the right incantation? I'm hardly satisfied with those explanations but I can't really think of anything else. More importantly, is it really a problem, and if so, what's the best way to help enlighten these people?

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• 2D Collision masks for handling slopes

  - by JiminyCricket

  I've been looking at the example at: http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/tutorial/collision_2d_perpixel and am trying to figure out how to adjust the sprite once a collision has been detected. As David suggested at XNA 4.0 2D sidescroller variable terrain heightmap for walking/collision, I made a few sensor points (feet, sides, bottom center, etc.) and can easily detect when these points actually collide with non-transparent portions of a second texture (simple slope). I'm having trouble with the algorithm of how I would actually adjust the sprite position based on a collision. Say I detect a collision with the slope at the sprite's right foot. How can I scan the slope texture data to find the Y position to place the sprite's foot so it is no longer inside the slope? The way it is stored as a 1D array in the example is a bit confusing, should I try to store the data as a 2D array instead? For test purposes, I'm thinking of just using the slope texture alpha itself as a primitive and easy collision mask (no grass bits or anything besides a simple non-linear slope). Then, as in the example, I find the coordinates of any collisions between the slope texture and the sprite's sensors and mark these special sensor collisions as having occurred. Finally, in the case of moving up a slope, I would scan for the first transparent pixel above (in the texture's Ys at that X) the right foot collision point and set that as the new height of the sprite. I'm a little unclear also on when I should make these adjustments. Collisions are checked on every game.update() so would I quickly change the position of the sprite before the next update is called? I also noticed several people mention that it's best to separate collision checks horizontally and vertically, why is that exactly? Open to any suggestions if this is an inefficient or inaccurate way of handling this. I wish MSDN had provided an example of something like this, I didn't know it would be so much more complex than NES Mario style pure box platforming!

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• Should a programmer "think" for the client?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  I have gotten to the point where I hate requirements gathering. Customer's are too vague for their own good. In an agile environment, where we can show the client a piece of work to completion it's not too bad as we can make small regular corrections/updates to functionality. In a "waterfall" type in environment (requirements first, nearly complete product next) things can get ugly. This kind of environment has led me to constantly question requirements. E.G. Customer wants "automatically convert input to the number 1" (referring to a Qty in an order). But what they don't think about is that "input" could be a simple type-o. An "x" in a textbox could be a "woops" not I want 1 of those "toothpaste" products. But, there's so much in the air with requirements that I could stand and correct for hours on end smashing out what they want. This just isn't healthy. Working for a corporation, I could try to adjust the culture to fit the agile model that would help us (no small job, above my pay grade). Or, sweep ugly details under the rug and hope for the best. Maybe my customer is trying to get too close to the code? How does one handle the problem of "thinking for the client" without pissing them off with too many questions?

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