Search Results

Search found 9983 results on 400 pages for 'fuzzy c means'.

Page 18/400 | < Previous Page | 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25  | Next Page >

  • SOLVED: Breaking parent web.config dependencies in sub applications

    This article explains how to implement a sub application such as a blog in your website without experiencing dependency issues. A common problem that developers experience is when their sub applications accidentally inherit requirements of the parent website. This is actually by design but read on if this is causing problems in your site. Scenario This problem has caught me out a couple of times so far but usually with enough of a gap between occurrences that it had become just a fuzzy memory....Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

    Read the article

  • Open-source and client-side IRC-Client

    - by user125197
    I'm administrating a homepage with an IRC-Webclient. At the moment, it uses a Java-client, modified to be SSL-compatible and compatible with whatever design I want to use. The usual PJIRC thing, with users wishes and concerns implemented (I'll give you SSL-PJIRC if you want - no problem. The login-script will be improved for IE6-support this weekend, means write the object tag if an old IE is found, that's it. Rest runs perfectly well). But still, the better user experience would be a client that only requires the user to enable JavaScript. So, before I go into rewriting and customizing a complete Java-IRC-solution, I'd like to ask some other people - after researching for half a year of time. The requirements are: a) Free hosting, no cgi-bin is acceptable. A lot of hosters also have CGI supported, but it doesn't allow IRC-access. So, seems you are limited to x10-hosting for CGI:IRC. b) Solution must be open source (not free as in free beer, but free as in free speech - I want to be able to read every line of the code). c) Hosting cannot be limited to Windows-hosting. Free operation systems (anything with Linux, BSD, whatever - I think you get what I mean) must be possible. d) No server-side technology. I'm limited to everything that runs client-side only. (Well, a Java-Applet does...). d) Solution must support SSL. e) The side must be able to move. Means, you register to a new free hoster, load your things up via FileZilla and the thing simply runs. No server-concerning implementations needed. f) Old browsers must be supported. From all my research, there are two ways a) Java-Applet b) Use HTML5-Websockets (it is impossible to use the JavaScript-library I found, as it depends on ActiveX - means, Windows hosting). b) means "you are going to enter very unstable content". I worked with HTML5 for month, and, well ... Though, HTML5 also is not suitable for older browsers (old browser support is an absolutely necessary requirement). PHP by the way is a server side solution ... so no line of PHP. My idea now was a Java Applet, and a fallback which again is embedded and proprietary, but only requieres JavaScript (wsirc or Mibbit are great here, whilst I prefer wsirc ... and zooming fonts that are plainly to small, but worse, cannot read the code). So my question is - with free hosting, not installation on server, plain upload - do you see and open source, complelety client-side, ssl-compatible way to use or write a client? This wouldn't be my first programming project, I'm not afraid of the code. If there was a way and I had to write it, even from scratch, I'd do. From all I know, there sadly is none. But maybe some experienced admin has an idea? Best Wishes, yetanotheruser Sry my English isn't perfect. It's enough for programming at least.

    Read the article

  • Simplex Noise Help

    - by Alex Larsen
    Im Making A Minecraft Like Gae In XNA C# And I Need To Generate Land With Caves This Is The Code For Simplex I Have /// <summary> /// 1D simplex noise /// </summary> /// <param name="x"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static float Generate(float x) { int i0 = FastFloor(x); int i1 = i0 + 1; float x0 = x - i0; float x1 = x0 - 1.0f; float n0, n1; float t0 = 1.0f - x0 * x0; t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[i0 & 0xff], x0); float t1 = 1.0f - x1 * x1; t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[i1 & 0xff], x1); // The maximum value of this noise is 8*(3/4)^4 = 2.53125 // A factor of 0.395 scales to fit exactly within [-1,1] return 0.395f * (n0 + n1); } /// <summary> /// 2D simplex noise /// </summary> /// <param name="x"></param> /// <param name="y"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static float Generate(float x, float y) { const float F2 = 0.366025403f; // F2 = 0.5*(sqrt(3.0)-1.0) const float G2 = 0.211324865f; // G2 = (3.0-Math.sqrt(3.0))/6.0 float n0, n1, n2; // Noise contributions from the three corners // Skew the input space to determine which simplex cell we're in float s = (x + y) * F2; // Hairy factor for 2D float xs = x + s; float ys = y + s; int i = FastFloor(xs); int j = FastFloor(ys); float t = (float)(i + j) * G2; float X0 = i - t; // Unskew the cell origin back to (x,y) space float Y0 = j - t; float x0 = x - X0; // The x,y distances from the cell origin float y0 = y - Y0; // For the 2D case, the simplex shape is an equilateral triangle. // Determine which simplex we are in. int i1, j1; // Offsets for second (middle) corner of simplex in (i,j) coords if (x0 > y0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; } // lower triangle, XY order: (0,0)->(1,0)->(1,1) else { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; } // upper triangle, YX order: (0,0)->(0,1)->(1,1) // A step of (1,0) in (i,j) means a step of (1-c,-c) in (x,y), and // a step of (0,1) in (i,j) means a step of (-c,1-c) in (x,y), where // c = (3-sqrt(3))/6 float x1 = x0 - i1 + G2; // Offsets for middle corner in (x,y) unskewed coords float y1 = y0 - j1 + G2; float x2 = x0 - 1.0f + 2.0f * G2; // Offsets for last corner in (x,y) unskewed coords float y2 = y0 - 1.0f + 2.0f * G2; // Wrap the integer indices at 256, to avoid indexing perm[] out of bounds int ii = i % 256; int jj = j % 256; // Calculate the contribution from the three corners float t0 = 0.5f - x0 * x0 - y0 * y0; if (t0 < 0.0f) n0 = 0.0f; else { t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[ii + perm[jj]], x0, y0); } float t1 = 0.5f - x1 * x1 - y1 * y1; if (t1 < 0.0f) n1 = 0.0f; else { t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[ii + i1 + perm[jj + j1]], x1, y1); } float t2 = 0.5f - x2 * x2 - y2 * y2; if (t2 < 0.0f) n2 = 0.0f; else { t2 *= t2; n2 = t2 * t2 * grad(perm[ii + 1 + perm[jj + 1]], x2, y2); } // Add contributions from each corner to get the final noise value. // The result is scaled to return values in the interval [-1,1]. return 40.0f * (n0 + n1 + n2); // TODO: The scale factor is preliminary! } public static float Generate(float x, float y, float z) { // Simple skewing factors for the 3D case const float F3 = 0.333333333f; const float G3 = 0.166666667f; float n0, n1, n2, n3; // Noise contributions from the four corners // Skew the input space to determine which simplex cell we're in float s = (x + y + z) * F3; // Very nice and simple skew factor for 3D float xs = x + s; float ys = y + s; float zs = z + s; int i = FastFloor(xs); int j = FastFloor(ys); int k = FastFloor(zs); float t = (float)(i + j + k) * G3; float X0 = i - t; // Unskew the cell origin back to (x,y,z) space float Y0 = j - t; float Z0 = k - t; float x0 = x - X0; // The x,y,z distances from the cell origin float y0 = y - Y0; float z0 = z - Z0; // For the 3D case, the simplex shape is a slightly irregular tetrahedron. // Determine which simplex we are in. int i1, j1, k1; // Offsets for second corner of simplex in (i,j,k) coords int i2, j2, k2; // Offsets for third corner of simplex in (i,j,k) coords /* This code would benefit from a backport from the GLSL version! */ if (x0 >= y0) { if (y0 >= z0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 1; k2 = 0; } // X Y Z order else if (x0 >= z0) { i1 = 1; j1 = 0; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 0; k2 = 1; } // X Z Y order else { i1 = 0; j1 = 0; k1 = 1; i2 = 1; j2 = 0; k2 = 1; } // Z X Y order } else { // x0<y0 if (y0 < z0) { i1 = 0; j1 = 0; k1 = 1; i2 = 0; j2 = 1; k2 = 1; } // Z Y X order else if (x0 < z0) { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; k1 = 0; i2 = 0; j2 = 1; k2 = 1; } // Y Z X order else { i1 = 0; j1 = 1; k1 = 0; i2 = 1; j2 = 1; k2 = 0; } // Y X Z order } // A step of (1,0,0) in (i,j,k) means a step of (1-c,-c,-c) in (x,y,z), // a step of (0,1,0) in (i,j,k) means a step of (-c,1-c,-c) in (x,y,z), and // a step of (0,0,1) in (i,j,k) means a step of (-c,-c,1-c) in (x,y,z), where // c = 1/6. float x1 = x0 - i1 + G3; // Offsets for second corner in (x,y,z) coords float y1 = y0 - j1 + G3; float z1 = z0 - k1 + G3; float x2 = x0 - i2 + 2.0f * G3; // Offsets for third corner in (x,y,z) coords float y2 = y0 - j2 + 2.0f * G3; float z2 = z0 - k2 + 2.0f * G3; float x3 = x0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; // Offsets for last corner in (x,y,z) coords float y3 = y0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; float z3 = z0 - 1.0f + 3.0f * G3; // Wrap the integer indices at 256, to avoid indexing perm[] out of bounds int ii = i % 256; int jj = j % 256; int kk = k % 256; // Calculate the contribution from the four corners float t0 = 0.6f - x0 * x0 - y0 * y0 - z0 * z0; if (t0 < 0.0f) n0 = 0.0f; else { t0 *= t0; n0 = t0 * t0 * grad(perm[ii + perm[jj + perm[kk]]], x0, y0, z0); } float t1 = 0.6f - x1 * x1 - y1 * y1 - z1 * z1; if (t1 < 0.0f) n1 = 0.0f; else { t1 *= t1; n1 = t1 * t1 * grad(perm[ii + i1 + perm[jj + j1 + perm[kk + k1]]], x1, y1, z1); } float t2 = 0.6f - x2 * x2 - y2 * y2 - z2 * z2; if (t2 < 0.0f) n2 = 0.0f; else { t2 *= t2; n2 = t2 * t2 * grad(perm[ii + i2 + perm[jj + j2 + perm[kk + k2]]], x2, y2, z2); } float t3 = 0.6f - x3 * x3 - y3 * y3 - z3 * z3; if (t3 < 0.0f) n3 = 0.0f; else { t3 *= t3; n3 = t3 * t3 * grad(perm[ii + 1 + perm[jj + 1 + perm[kk + 1]]], x3, y3, z3); } // Add contributions from each corner to get the final noise value. // The result is scaled to stay just inside [-1,1] return 32.0f * (n0 + n1 + n2 + n3); // TODO: The scale factor is preliminary! } private static byte[] perm = new byte[512] { 151,160,137,91,90,15, 131,13,201,95,96,53,194,233,7,225,140,36,103,30,69,142,8,99,37,240,21,10,23, 190, 6,148,247,120,234,75,0,26,197,62,94,252,219,203,117,35,11,32,57,177,33, 88,237,149,56,87,174,20,125,136,171,168, 68,175,74,165,71,134,139,48,27,166, 77,146,158,231,83,111,229,122,60,211,133,230,220,105,92,41,55,46,245,40,244, 102,143,54, 65,25,63,161, 1,216,80,73,209,76,132,187,208, 89,18,169,200,196, 135,130,116,188,159,86,164,100,109,198,173,186, 3,64,52,217,226,250,124,123, 5,202,38,147,118,126,255,82,85,212,207,206,59,227,47,16,58,17,182,189,28,42, 223,183,170,213,119,248,152, 2,44,154,163, 70,221,153,101,155,167, 43,172,9, 129,22,39,253, 19,98,108,110,79,113,224,232,178,185, 112,104,218,246,97,228, 251,34,242,193,238,210,144,12,191,179,162,241, 81,51,145,235,249,14,239,107, 49,192,214, 31,181,199,106,157,184, 84,204,176,115,121,50,45,127, 4,150,254, 138,236,205,93,222,114,67,29,24,72,243,141,128,195,78,66,215,61,156,180, 151,160,137,91,90,15, 131,13,201,95,96,53,194,233,7,225,140,36,103,30,69,142,8,99,37,240,21,10,23, 190, 6,148,247,120,234,75,0,26,197,62,94,252,219,203,117,35,11,32,57,177,33, 88,237,149,56,87,174,20,125,136,171,168, 68,175,74,165,71,134,139,48,27,166, 77,146,158,231,83,111,229,122,60,211,133,230,220,105,92,41,55,46,245,40,244, 102,143,54, 65,25,63,161, 1,216,80,73,209,76,132,187,208, 89,18,169,200,196, 135,130,116,188,159,86,164,100,109,198,173,186, 3,64,52,217,226,250,124,123, 5,202,38,147,118,126,255,82,85,212,207,206,59,227,47,16,58,17,182,189,28,42, 223,183,170,213,119,248,152, 2,44,154,163, 70,221,153,101,155,167, 43,172,9, 129,22,39,253, 19,98,108,110,79,113,224,232,178,185, 112,104,218,246,97,228, 251,34,242,193,238,210,144,12,191,179,162,241, 81,51,145,235,249,14,239,107, 49,192,214, 31,181,199,106,157,184, 84,204,176,115,121,50,45,127, 4,150,254, 138,236,205,93,222,114,67,29,24,72,243,141,128,195,78,66,215,61,156,180 }; private static int FastFloor(float x) { return (x > 0) ? ((int)x) : (((int)x) - 1); } private static float grad(int hash, float x) { int h = hash & 15; float grad = 1.0f + (h & 7); // Gradient value 1.0, 2.0, ..., 8.0 if ((h & 8) != 0) grad = -grad; // Set a random sign for the gradient return (grad * x); // Multiply the gradient with the distance } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y) { int h = hash & 7; // Convert low 3 bits of hash code float u = h < 4 ? x : y; // into 8 simple gradient directions, float v = h < 4 ? y : x; // and compute the dot product with (x,y). return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -2.0f * v : 2.0f * v); } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y, float z) { int h = hash & 15; // Convert low 4 bits of hash code into 12 simple float u = h < 8 ? x : y; // gradient directions, and compute dot product. float v = h < 4 ? y : h == 12 || h == 14 ? x : z; // Fix repeats at h = 12 to 15 return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -v : v); } private static float grad(int hash, float x, float y, float z, float t) { int h = hash & 31; // Convert low 5 bits of hash code into 32 simple float u = h < 24 ? x : y; // gradient directions, and compute dot product. float v = h < 16 ? y : z; float w = h < 8 ? z : t; return ((h & 1) != 0 ? -u : u) + ((h & 2) != 0 ? -v : v) + ((h & 4) != 0 ? -w : w); } This Is My World Generation Code Block[,] BlocksInMap = new Block[1024, 256]; public bool IsWorldGenerated = false; Random r = new Random(); private void RunThread() { for (int BH = 0; BH <= 256; BH++) { for (int BW = 0; BW <= 1024; BW++) { Block b = new Block(); if (BH >= 192) { } BlocksInMap[BW, BH] = b; } } IsWorldGenerated = true; } public void GenWorld() { new Thread(new ThreadStart(RunThread)).Start(); } And This Is A Example Of How I Set Blocks Block b = new Block(); b.BlockType = = Block.BlockTypes.Air; This Is A Example Of How I Set Models foreach (Block b in MyWorld) { switch(b.BlockType) { case Block.BlockTypes.Dirt: b.Model = DirtModel; break; ect. } } How Would I Use These To Generate To World (The Block Array) And If Possible Thread It More? btw It's 1024 Wide And 256 Tall

    Read the article

  • The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #2 - Balancing the forces

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/02/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---2---balancing-the-forces.aspxCategorizing requirements is the prerequisite for ecconomic architectural decisions. Not all requirements are created equal. However, to truely understand and describe the requirement forces pulling on software development, I think further examination of the requirements aspects is varranted. Aspects of Functionality There are two sides to Functionality requirements. It´s about what a software should do. I call that the Operations it implements. Operations are defined by expressions and control structures or calls to frameworks of some sort, i.e. (business) logic statements. Operations calculate, transform, aggregate, validate, send, receive, load, store etc. Operations are about behavior; they take input and produce output by considering state. I´m not using the term “function” here, because functions - or methods or sub-programs - are not necessary to implement Operations. Functions belong to a different sub-aspect of requirements (see below). Operations alone are not enough, though, to make a customer happy with regard to his/her Functionality requirements. Only correctly implemented Operations provide full value. This should make clear, why testing is so important. And not just manual tests during development of some operational feature, but automated tests. Because only automated tests scale when over time the number of operations increases. Without automated tests there is no guarantee formerly correct operations are still correct after more got added. To retest all previous operations manually is infeasible. So whoever relies just on manual tests is not really balancing the two forces Operations and Correctness. With manual tests more weight is put on the side of the scale of Operations. That might be ok for a short period of time - but in the long run it will bite you. You need to plan for Correctness in the long run from the first day of your project on. Aspects of Quality As important as Functionality is, it´s not the driver for software development. No software has ever been written to just implement some operation in code. We don´t need computers just to do something. All computers can do with software we can do without them. Well, at least given enough time and resources. We could calculate the most complex formulas without computers. We could do auctions with millions of people without computers. The only reason we want computers to help us with this and a million other Operations is… We don´t want to wait for the results very long. Or we want less errors. Or we want easier accessability to complicated solutions. So the main reason for customers to buy/order software is some Quality. They want some Functionality with a higher Quality (e.g. performance, scalability, usability, security…) than without the software. But Qualities come in at least two flavors: Most important are Primary Qualities. That´s the Qualities software truely is written for. Take an online auction website for example. Its Primary Qualities are performance, scalability, and usability, I´d say. Auctions should come within reach of millions of people; setting up an auction should be very easy; finding a suitable auction and bidding on it should be as fast as possible. Only if those Qualities have been implemented does security become relevant. A secure auction website is important - but not as important as a fast auction website. Nobody would want to use the most secure auction website if it was unbearably slow. But there would be people willing to use the fastest auction website even it was lacking security. That´s why security - with regard to online auction software - is not a Primary Quality, but just a Secondary Quality. It´s a supporting quality, so to speak. It does not deliver value by itself. With a password manager software this might be different. There security might be a Primary Quality. Please get me right: I don´t want to denigrate any Quality. There´s a long list of non-functional requirements at Wikipedia. They are all created equal - but that does not mean they are equally important for all software projects. When confronted with Quality requirements check with the customer which are primary and which are secondary. That will help to make good economical decisions when in a crunch. Resources are always limited - but requirements are a bottomless ocean. Aspects of Security of Investment Functionality and Quality are traditionally the requirement aspects cared for most - by customers and developers alike. Even today, when pressure rises in a project, tunnel vision will focus on them. Any measures to create and hold up Security of Investment (SoI) will be out of the window pretty quickly. Resistance to customers and/or management is futile. As long as SoI is not placed on equal footing with Functionality and Quality it´s bound to suffer under pressure. To look closer at what SoI means will help to become more conscious about it and make customers and management aware of the risks of neglecting it. SoI to me has two facets: Production Efficiency (PE) is about speed of delivering value. Customers like short response times. Short response times mean less money spent. So whatever makes software development faster supports this requirement. This must not lead to duct tape programming and banging out features by the dozen, though. Because customers don´t just want Operations and Quality, but also Correctness. So if Correctness gets compromised by focussing too much on Production Efficiency it will fire back. Customers want PE not just today, but over the whole course of a software´s lifecycle. That means, it´s not just about coding speed, but equally about code quality. If code quality leads to rework the PE is on an unsatisfactory level. Also if code production leads to waste it´s unsatisfactory. Because the effort which went into waste could have been used to produce value. Rework and waste cost money. Rework and waste abound, however, as long as PE is not addressed explicitly with management and customers. Thanks to the Agile and Lean movements that´s increasingly the case. Nevertheless more could and should be done in many teams. Each and every developer should keep in mind that Production Efficiency is as important to the customer as Functionality and Quality - whether he/she states it or not. Making software development more efficient is important - but still sooner or later even agile projects are going to hit a glas ceiling. At least as long as they neglect the second SoI facet: Evolvability. Delivering correct high quality functionality in short cycles today is good. But not just any software structure will allow this to happen for an indefinite amount of time.[1] The less explicitly software was designed the sooner it´s going to get stuck. Big ball of mud, monolith, brownfield, legacy code, technical debt… there are many names for software structures that have lost the ability to evolve, to be easily changed to accomodate new requirements. An evolvable code base is the opposite of a brownfield. It´s code which can be easily understood (by developers with sufficient domain expertise) and then easily changed to accomodate new requirements. Ideally the costs of adding feature X to an evolvable code base is independent of when it is requested - or at least the costs should only increase linearly, not exponentially.[2] Clean Code, Agile Architecture, and even traditional Software Engineering are concerned with Evolvability. However, it seems no systematic way of achieving it has been layed out yet. TDD + SOLID help - but still… When I look at the design ability reality in teams I see much room for improvement. As stated previously, SoI - or to be more precise: Evolvability - can hardly be measured. Plus the customer rarely states an explicit expectation with regard to it. That´s why I think, special care must be taken to not neglect it. Postponing it to some large refactorings should not be an option. Rather Evolvability needs to be a core concern for every single developer day. This should not mean Evolvability is more important than any of the other requirement aspects. But neither is it less important. That´s why more effort needs to be invested into it, to bring it on par with the other aspects, which usually are much more in focus. In closing As you see, requirements are of quite different kinds. To not take that into account will make it harder to understand the customer, and to make economic decisions. Those sub-aspects of requirements are forces pulling in different directions. To improve performance might have an impact on Evolvability. To increase Production Efficiency might have an impact on security etc. No requirement aspect should go unchecked when deciding how to allocate resources. Balancing should be explicit. And it should be possible to trace back each decision to a requirement. Why is there a null-check on parameters at the start of the method? Why are there 5000 LOC in this method? Why are there interfaces on those classes? Why is this functionality running on the threadpool? Why is this function defined on that class? Why is this class depending on three other classes? These and a thousand more questions are not to mean anything should be different in a code base. But it´s important to know the reason behind all of these decisions. Because not knowing the reason possibly means waste and having decided suboptimally. And how do we ensure to balance all requirement aspects? That needs practices and transparency. Practices means doing things a certain way and not another, even though that might be possible. We´re dealing with dangerous tools here. Like a knife is a dangerous tool. Harm can be done if we use our tools in just any way at the whim of the moment. Over the centuries rules and practices have been established how to use knifes. You don´t put them in peoples´ legs just because you´re feeling like it. You hand over a knife with the handle towards the receiver. You might not even be allowed to cut round food like potatos or eggs with it. The same should be the case for dangerous tools like object-orientation, remote communication, threads etc. We need practices to use them in a way so requirements are balanced almost automatically. In addition, to be able to work on software as a team we need transparency. We need means to share our thoughts, to work jointly on mental models. So far our tools are focused on working with code. Testing frameworks, build servers, DI containers, intellisense, refactoring support… That´s all nice and well. I don´t want to miss any of that. But I think it´s not enough. We´re missing mental tools, tools for making thinking and talking about software (independently of code) easier. You might think, enough of such tools already exist like all those UML diagram types or Flow Charts. But then, isn´t it strange, hardly any team is using them to design software? Or is that just due to a lack of education? I don´t think so. It´s a matter value/weight ratio: the current mental tools are too heavy weight compared to the value they deliver. So my conclusion is, we need lightweight tools to really be able to balance requirements. Software development is complex. We need guidance not to forget important aspects. That´s like with flying an airplane. Pilots don´t just jump in and take off for their destination. Yes, there are times when they are “flying by the seats of their pants”, when they are just experts doing thing intuitively. But most of the time they are going through honed practices called checklist. See “The Checklist Manifesto” for very enlightening details on this. Maybe then I should say it like this: We need more checklists for the complex businss of software development.[3] But that´s what software development mostly is about: changing software over an unknown period of time. It needs to be corrected in order to finally provide promised operations. It needs to be enhanced to provide ever more operations and qualities. All this without knowing when it´s going to stop. Probably never - until “maintainability” hits a wall when the technical debt is too large, the brownfield too deep. Software development is not a sprint, is not a marathon, not even an ultra marathon. Because to all this there is a foreseeable end. Software development is like continuously and foreever running… ? And sometimes I dare to think that costs could even decrease over time. Think of it: With each feature a software becomes richer in functionality. So with each additional feature the chance of there being already functionality helping its implementation increases. That should lead to less costs of feature X if it´s requested later than sooner. X requested later could stand on the shoulders of previous features. Alas, reality seems to be far from this despite 20+ years of admonishing developers to think in terms of reusability.[1] ? Please don´t get me wrong: I don´t want to bog down the “art” of software development with heavyweight practices and heaps of rules to follow. The framework we need should be lightweight. It should not stand in the way of delivering value to the customer. It´s purpose is even to make that easier by helping us to focus and decreasing waste and rework. ?

    Read the article

  • Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

    - by Bart Read
    I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

    Read the article

  • Now Available &ndash; Windows Azure SDK 1.6

    - by Shaun
    Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.6. Now people can download the latest product through the WebPI. After you downloaded and installed the SDK you will find that The SDK 1.6 can be stayed side by side with the SDK 1.5, which means you can still using the 1.5 assemblies. But the Visual Studio Tools would be upgraded to 1.6. Different from the previous SDK, in this version it includes 4 components: Windows Azure Authoring Tools, Windows Azure Emulators, Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. There are some significant upgrades in this version, which are Publishing Enhancement: More easily connect to the Windows Azure when publish your application by retrieving a publish setting file. It will let you configure some settings of the deployment, without getting back to the developer portal. Multi-profiles: The publish settings, cloud configuration files, etc. will be stored in one or more MSBuild files. It will be much easier to switch the settings between vary build environments. MSBuild Command-line Build Support. In-Place Upgrade Support.   Publishing Enhancement So let’s have a look about the new features of the publishing. Just create a new Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010 with a MVC 3 Web Role, and right-click the Windows Azure project node in the solution explorer, then select Publish, we will find the new publish dialog. In this version the first thing we need to do is to connect to our Windows Azure subscription. Click the “Sign in to download credentials” link, we will be navigated to the login page to provide the Live ID. The Windows Azure Tool will generate a certificate file and uploaded to the subscriptions those belong to us. Then we will download a PUBLISHSETTINGS file, which contains the credentials and subscriptions information. The Visual Studio Tool will generate a certificate and deployed to the subscriptions you have as the Management Certificate. The VS Tool will use this certificate to connect to the subscription in the next step. In the next step, I would back to the Visual Studio (the publish dialog should be stilling opened) and click the Import button, select the PUBLISHSETTINGS file I had just downloaded. Then all my subscriptions will be shown in the dropdown list. Select a subscription that I want the application to be published and press the Next button, then we can select the hosted service, environment, build configuration and service configuration shown in the dialog. In this version we can create a new hosted service directly here rather than go back to the developer portal. Just select the <Create New …> item in the hosted service. What we need to do is to provide the hosted service name and the location. Once clicked the OK, after several seconds the hosted service will be established. If we went to the developer portal we will find the new hosted service in my subscription. a) Currently we cannot select the Affinity Group when create a new hosted service through the Visual Studio Publish dialog. b) Although we can specify the hosted service name and DNS prefixing through the developer portal, we cannot do so from the VS Tool, which means the DNS prefixing would be the same as what we specified for the hosted service name. For example, we specified our hosted service name as “Sdk16Demo”, so the public URL would be http://sdk16demo.cloudapp.net/. After created a new hosted service we can select the cloud environment (production or staging), the build configuration (release or debug), and the service configuration (cloud or local). And we can set the Remote Desktop by check the related checkbox as well. One thing should be note is that, in this version when we set the Remote Desktop settings we don’t need to specify a certificate by default. This is because the Visual Studio will generate a new certificate for us by default. But we can still specify an existing certificate for RDC, by clicking the “More Options” button. Visual Studio Tool will create another certificate for the Remote Desktop connection. It will NOT use the certificate that managing the subscription. We also can select the “Advanced Settings” page to specify the deployment label, storage account, IntelliTrace and .NET profiling information, etc.. Press Next button, the dialog will display all settings I had just specified and it will save them as a new profile. The last step is to click the Publish button. Since we enabled the Remote Desktop feature, the first step of publishing was uploading the certificate. And then it will verify the storage account we specified and upload the package, then finally created the website in Windows Azure.   Multi-Profiles After published, if we back to the Visual Studio we can find a AZUREPUBXML file under the Profiles folder in the Azure project. It includes all settings we specified before. If we publish this project again, we can just use the current settings (hosted service, environment, RDC, etc.) from this profile without input them again. And this is very useful when we have more than one deployment settings. For example it would be able to have one AZUREPUBXML profile for deploying to testing environment (debug building, less roles with RDC and IntelliTrace) and one for production (release building, more roles but without IntelliTrace).   In-Place Upgrade Support Let’s change some codes in the MVC pages and click the Publish menu from the azure project node. No need to specify any settings,  here we can use the pervious settings by loading the azure profile file (AZUREPUBXML). After clicked the Publish button the VS Tool brought a dialog to us to indicate that there’s a deployment available in the hosted service environment, and prompt to REPLACE it or not. Notice that in this version, the dialog tool said “replace” rather than “delete”, which means by default the VS Tool will use In-Place Upgrade when we deploy to a hosted service that has a deployment already exist. After click Yes the VS Tool will upload the package and perform the In-Place Upgrade. If we back to the developer portal we can find that the status of the hosted service was turned to “Updating…”. But in the previous SDK, it will try to delete the whole deployment and publish a new one.   Summary When the Microsoft announced the features that allows the changing VM size via In-Place Upgrade, they also mentioned that in the next few versions the user experience of publishing the azure application would be improved. The target was trying to accomplish the whole publish experience in Visual Studio, which means no need to touch developer portal any more. In the SDK 1.6 we can see from the new publish dialog, as a developer we can do the whole process, includes creating hosted service, specifying the environment, configuration, remote desktop, etc. values without going back the the developer portal.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

    Read the article

  • CDN on Hosted Service in Windows Azure

    - by Shaun
    Yesterday I told Wang Tao, an annoying colleague sitting beside me, about how to make the static content enable the CDN in his website which had just been published on Windows Azure. The approach would be Move the static content, the images, CSS files, etc. into the blob storage. Enable the CDN on his storage account. Change the URL of those static files to the CDN URL. I think these are the very common steps when using CDN. But this morning I found that the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 and new Windows Azure Developer Portal had just been published announced at the Windows Azure Blog. One of the new features in this release is about the CDN, which means we can enabled the CDN not only for a storage account, but a hosted service as well. Within this new feature the steps I mentioned above would be turned simpler a lot.   Enable CDN for Hosted Service To enable the CDN for a hosted service we just need to log on the Windows Azure Developer Portal. Under the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN” item we will find a new menu on the left hand side said “CDN”, where we can manage the CDN for storage account and hosted service. As we can see the hosted services and storage accounts are all listed in my subscriptions. To enable a CDN for a hosted service is veru simple, just select a hosted service and click the New Endpoint button on top. In this dialog we can select the subscription and the storage account, or the hosted service we want the CDN to be enabled. If we selected the hosted service, like I did in the image above, the “Source URL for the CDN endpoint” will be shown automatically. This means the windows azure platform will make all contents under the “/cdn” folder as CDN enabled. But we cannot change the value at the moment. The following 3 checkboxes next to the URL are: Enable CDN: Enable or disable the CDN. HTTPS: If we need to use HTTPS connections check it. Query String: If we are caching content from a hosted service and we are using query strings to specify the content to be retrieved, check it. Just click the “Create” button to let the windows azure create the CDN for our hosted service. The CDN would be available within 60 minutes as Microsoft mentioned. My experience is that about 15 minutes the CDN could be used and we can find the CDN URL in the portal as well.   Put the Content in CDN in Hosted Service Let’s create a simple windows azure project in Visual Studio with a MVC 2 Web Role. When we created the CDN mentioned above the source URL of CDN endpoint would be under the “/cdn” folder. So in the Visual Studio we create a folder under the website named “cdn” and put some static files there. Then all these files would be cached by CDN if we use the CDN endpoint. The CDN of the hosted service can cache some kind of “dynamic” result with the Query String feature enabled. We create a controller named CdnController and a GetNumber action in it. The routed URL of this controller would be /Cdn/GetNumber which can be CDN-ed as well since the URL said it’s under the “/cdn” folder. In the GetNumber action we just put a number value which specified by parameter into the view model, then the URL could be like /Cdn/GetNumber?number=2. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6:  7: namespace MvcWebRole1.Controllers 8: { 9: public class CdnController : Controller 10: { 11: // 12: // GET: /Cdn/ 13:  14: public ActionResult GetNumber(int number) 15: { 16: return View(number); 17: } 18:  19: } 20: } And we add a view to display the number which is super simple. 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<int>" %> 2:  3: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> 4: GetNumber 5: </asp:Content> 6:  7: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 8:  9: <h2>The number is: <% 1: : Model.ToString() %></h2> 10:  11: </asp:Content> Since this action is under the CdnController the URL would be under the “/cdn” folder which means it can be CDN-ed. And since we checked the “Query String” the content of this dynamic page will be cached by its query string. So if I use the CDN URL, http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?number=2, the CDN will firstly check if there’s any content cached with the key “GetNumber?number=2”. If yes then the CDN will return the content directly; otherwise it will connect to the hosted service, http://aurora-sys.cloudapp.net/Cdn/GetNumber?number=2, and then send the result back to the browser and cached in CDN. But to be notice that the query string are treated as string when used by the key of CDN element. This means the URLs below would be cached in 2 elements in CDN: http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?number=2&page=1 http://az25311.vo.msecnd.net/GetNumber?page=1&number=2 The final step is to upload the project onto azure. Test the Hosted Service CDN After published the project on azure, we can use the CDN in the website. The CDN endpoint we had created is az25311.vo.msecnd.net so all files under the “/cdn” folder can be requested with it. Let’s have a try on the sample.htm and c_great_wall.jpg static files. Also we can request the dynamic page GetNumber with the query string with the CDN endpoint. And if we refresh this page it will be shown very quickly since the content comes from the CDN without MCV server side process. We style of this page was missing. This is because the CSS file was not includes in the “/cdn” folder so the page cannot retrieve the CSS file from the CDN URL.   Summary In this post I introduced the new feature in Windows Azure CDN with the release of Windows Azure SDK 1.4 and new Developer Portal. With the CDN of the Hosted Service we can just put the static resources under a “/cdn” folder so that the CDN can cache them automatically and no need to put then into the blob storage. Also it support caching the dynamic content with the Query String feature. So that we can cache some parts of the web page by using the UserController and CDN. For example we can cache the log on user control in the master page so that the log on part will be loaded super-fast. There are some other new features within this release you can find here. And for more detailed information about the Windows Azure CDN please have a look here as well.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

    Read the article

  • Why does Akonadi on KDE 4.6.0 refuse to start?

    - by Patches
    Akonadi refuses to start on my fresh installation of KDE 4.6.0 from the kubuntu-backports PPA on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, preventing me from usking KMail. Here is the full error output: patches@pleistocene:~/.local/share$ akonadictl start Starting Akonadi Server... done. patches@pleistocene:~/.local/share$ Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString) search paths: ("/home/patches/bin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/sbin", "/bin", "/usr/games", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/libexec", "/usr/libexec", "/opt/mysql/libexec", "/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin", "/opt/mysql/sbin") Found mysql_install_db: "/usr/bin/mysql_install_db" Found mysqlcheck: "/usr/bin/mysqlcheck" Database process exited unexpectedly during initial connection! executable: "/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi" arguments: ("--defaults-file=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf", "--datadir=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/", "--socket=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/mysql.socket") stdout: "" stderr: "Could not open required defaults file: /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Can't find file: './mysql/plugin.frm' (errno: 13) 110209 16:41:12 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. 110209 16:41:12 InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file operation. InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to InnoDB: the directory. InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1 InnoDB: File operation call: 'create'. InnoDB: Cannot continue operation. " exit code: 1 process error: "Unknown error" "[ 0: akonadiserver(_Z11akBacktracev+0x35) [0x8086055] 1: akonadiserver() [0x8086516] 2: [0xb772e400] 3: [0xb772e416] 4: /lib/libc.so.6(gsignal+0x51) [0xb6e9f941] 5: /lib/libc.so.6(abort+0x182) [0xb6ea2e42] 6: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_Z17qt_message_output9QtMsgTypePKc+0x8c) [0xb74d62dc] 7: akonadiserver(_ZN15FileDebugStream9writeDataEPKcx+0xc4) [0x8087574] 8: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN9QIODevice5writeEPKcx+0x8e) [0xb757168e] 9: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(+0x103425) [0xb7581425] 10: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN11QTextStreamD1Ev+0x3d) [0xb758295d] 11: akonadiserver(_ZN6QDebugD1Ev+0x43) [0x8081b73] 12: akonadiserver(_ZN13DbConfigMysql19startInternalServerEv+0x1c27) [0x810c177] 13: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer20startDatabaseProcessEv+0xe3) [0x8087a23] 14: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServerC1EP7QObject+0xca) [0x8088b6a] 15: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer8instanceEv+0x48) [0x808a1d8] 16: akonadiserver(main+0x364) [0x8080fb4] 17: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7) [0xb6e8bce7] 18: akonadiserver() [0x8080b81] ] " ProcessControl: Application 'akonadiserver' returned with exit code 255 (Unknown error) search paths: ("/home/patches/bin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/sbin", "/bin", "/usr/games", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/libexec", "/usr/libexec", "/opt/mysql/libexec", "/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin", "/opt/mysql/sbin") Found mysql_install_db: "/usr/bin/mysql_install_db" Found mysqlcheck: "/usr/bin/mysqlcheck" Database process exited unexpectedly during initial connection! executable: "/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi" arguments: ("--defaults-file=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf", "--datadir=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/", "--socket=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/mysql.socket") stdout: "" stderr: "Could not open required defaults file: /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Can't find file: './mysql/plugin.frm' (errno: 13) 110209 16:41:12 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. 110209 16:41:12 InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file operation. InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to InnoDB: the directory. InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1 InnoDB: File operation call: 'create'. InnoDB: Cannot continue operation. " exit code: 1 process error: "Unknown error" "[ 0: akonadiserver(_Z11akBacktracev+0x35) [0x8086055] 1: akonadiserver() [0x8086516] 2: [0xb77ae400] 3: [0xb77ae416] 4: /lib/libc.so.6(gsignal+0x51) [0xb6f1f941] 5: /lib/libc.so.6(abort+0x182) [0xb6f22e42] 6: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_Z17qt_message_output9QtMsgTypePKc+0x8c) [0xb75562dc] 7: akonadiserver(_ZN15FileDebugStream9writeDataEPKcx+0xc4) [0x8087574] 8: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN9QIODevice5writeEPKcx+0x8e) [0xb75f168e] 9: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(+0x103425) [0xb7601425] 10: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN11QTextStreamD1Ev+0x3d) [0xb760295d] 11: akonadiserver(_ZN6QDebugD1Ev+0x43) [0x8081b73] 12: akonadiserver(_ZN13DbConfigMysql19startInternalServerEv+0x1c27) [0x810c177] 13: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer20startDatabaseProcessEv+0xe3) [0x8087a23] 14: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServerC1EP7QObject+0xca) [0x8088b6a] 15: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer8instanceEv+0x48) [0x808a1d8] 16: akonadiserver(main+0x364) [0x8080fb4] 17: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7) [0xb6f0bce7] 18: akonadiserver() [0x8080b81] ] " ProcessControl: Application 'akonadiserver' returned with exit code 255 (Unknown error) search paths: ("/home/patches/bin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/sbin", "/bin", "/usr/games", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/libexec", "/usr/libexec", "/opt/mysql/libexec", "/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin", "/opt/mysql/sbin") Found mysql_install_db: "/usr/bin/mysql_install_db" Found mysqlcheck: "/usr/bin/mysqlcheck" Database process exited unexpectedly during initial connection! executable: "/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi" arguments: ("--defaults-file=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf", "--datadir=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/", "--socket=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/mysql.socket") stdout: "" stderr: "Could not open required defaults file: /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Can't find file: './mysql/plugin.frm' (errno: 13) 110209 16:41:12 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. 110209 16:41:12 InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file operation. InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to InnoDB: the directory. InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1 InnoDB: File operation call: 'create'. InnoDB: Cannot continue operation. " exit code: 1 process error: "Unknown error" "[ 0: akonadiserver(_Z11akBacktracev+0x35) [0x8086055] 1: akonadiserver() [0x8086516] 2: [0xb778b400] 3: [0xb778b416] 4: /lib/libc.so.6(gsignal+0x51) [0xb6efc941] 5: /lib/libc.so.6(abort+0x182) [0xb6effe42] 6: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_Z17qt_message_output9QtMsgTypePKc+0x8c) [0xb75332dc] 7: akonadiserver(_ZN15FileDebugStream9writeDataEPKcx+0xc4) [0x8087574] 8: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN9QIODevice5writeEPKcx+0x8e) [0xb75ce68e] 9: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(+0x103425) [0xb75de425] 10: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN11QTextStreamD1Ev+0x3d) [0xb75df95d] 11: akonadiserver(_ZN6QDebugD1Ev+0x43) [0x8081b73] 12: akonadiserver(_ZN13DbConfigMysql19startInternalServerEv+0x1c27) [0x810c177] 13: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer20startDatabaseProcessEv+0xe3) [0x8087a23] 14: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServerC1EP7QObject+0xca) [0x8088b6a] 15: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer8instanceEv+0x48) [0x808a1d8] 16: akonadiserver(main+0x364) [0x8080fb4] 17: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7) [0xb6ee8ce7] 18: akonadiserver() [0x8080b81] ] " ProcessControl: Application 'akonadiserver' returned with exit code 255 (Unknown error) search paths: ("/home/patches/bin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/bin", "/sbin", "/bin", "/usr/games", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/local/libexec", "/usr/libexec", "/opt/mysql/libexec", "/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin", "/opt/mysql/sbin") Found mysql_install_db: "/usr/bin/mysql_install_db" Found mysqlcheck: "/usr/bin/mysqlcheck" Database process exited unexpectedly during initial connection! executable: "/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi" arguments: ("--defaults-file=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf", "--datadir=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/", "--socket=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/mysql.socket") stdout: "" stderr: "Could not open required defaults file: /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Warning] Can't create test file /home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/pleistocene.lower-test 110209 16:41:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. /usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi: Can't find file: './mysql/plugin.frm' (errno: 13) 110209 16:41:12 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. 110209 16:41:12 InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file operation. InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to InnoDB: the directory. InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1 InnoDB: File operation call: 'create'. InnoDB: Cannot continue operation. " exit code: 1 process error: "Unknown error" "[ 0: akonadiserver(_Z11akBacktracev+0x35) [0x8086055] 1: akonadiserver() [0x8086516] 2: [0xb784e400] 3: [0xb784e416] 4: /lib/libc.so.6(gsignal+0x51) [0xb6fbf941] 5: /lib/libc.so.6(abort+0x182) [0xb6fc2e42] 6: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_Z17qt_message_output9QtMsgTypePKc+0x8c) [0xb75f62dc] 7: akonadiserver(_ZN15FileDebugStream9writeDataEPKcx+0xc4) [0x8087574] 8: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN9QIODevice5writeEPKcx+0x8e) [0xb769168e] 9: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(+0x103425) [0xb76a1425] 10: /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN11QTextStreamD1Ev+0x3d) [0xb76a295d] 11: akonadiserver(_ZN6QDebugD1Ev+0x43) [0x8081b73] 12: akonadiserver(_ZN13DbConfigMysql19startInternalServerEv+0x1c27) [0x810c177] 13: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer20startDatabaseProcessEv+0xe3) [0x8087a23] 14: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServerC1EP7QObject+0xca) [0x8088b6a] 15: akonadiserver(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer8instanceEv+0x48) [0x808a1d8] 16: akonadiserver(main+0x364) [0x8080fb4] 17: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe7) [0xb6fabce7] 18: akonadiserver() [0x8080b81] ] " ProcessControl: Application 'akonadiserver' returned with exit code 255 (Unknown error) "akonadiserver" crashed too often and will not be restarted! I tried moving the ~/.local/share/akonadi folder and running it fresh, and I also tried starting Akonadi from a brand new user, all to no avail. Requested by @djeikyb: patches@pleistocene:~$ ls -ld ~/.local drwxrwx--- 3 patches patches 4096 2011-02-07 03:15 /home/patches/.local patches@pleistocene:~$ mysql_upgrade Looking for 'mysql' as: mysql Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: mysqlcheck Running 'mysqlcheck' with connection arguments: '--port=3306' '--socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' mysqlcheck: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) when trying to connect FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed patches@pleistocene:~$ mysql_upgrade -S ~/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/ Looking for 'mysql' as: mysql Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: mysqlcheck Running 'mysqlcheck' with connection arguments: '--port=3306' '--socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' '--socket=/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/' mysqlcheck: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/home/patches/.local/share/akonadi/socket-pleistocene/' (111) when trying to connect FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed

    Read the article

  • Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

    - by [email protected]
    A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

    Read the article

  • Implementation question involving implementing an interface

    - by Vivin Paliath
    I'm writing a set of collection classes for different types of Trees. I'm doing this as a learning exercise and I'm also hoping it turns out to be something useful. I really want to do this the right way and so I've been reading Effective Java and I've also been looking at the way Joshua Bloch implemented the collection classes by looking at the source. I seem to have a fair idea of what is being done, but I still have a few things to sort out. I have a Node<T> interface and an AbstractNode<T> class that implements the Node interface. I then created a GenericNode<T> (a node that can have 0 to n children, and that is part of an n-ary tree) class that extends AbstractNode<T> and implements Node<T>. This part was easy. Next, I created a Tree<T> interface and an AbstractTree<T> class that implements the Tree<T> interface. After that, I started writing a GenericTree<T> class that extends AbstractTree<T> and implements Tree<T>. This is where I started having problems. As far as the design is concerned, a GenericTree<T> can only consist of nodes of type GenericTreeNode<T>. This includes the root. In my Tree<T> interface I have: public interface Tree<T> { void setRoot(Node<T> root); Node<T> getRoot(); List<Node<T>> postOrder(); ... rest omitted ... } And, AbstractTree<T> implements this interface: public abstract class AbstractTree<T> implements Tree<T> { protected Node<T> root; protected AbstractTree() { } protected AbstractTree(Node<T> root) { this.root = root; } public void setRoot(Node<T> root) { this.root = root; } public Node<T> getRoot() { return this.root; } ... rest omitted ... } In GenericTree<T>, I can have: public GenericTree(Node<T> root) { super(root); } But what this means is that you can create a generic tree using any subtype of Node<T>. You can also set the root of a tree to any subtype of Node<T>. I want to be able to restrict the type of the node to the type of the tree that it can represent. To fix this, I can do this: public GenericTree(GenericNode<T> root) { super(root); } However, setRoot still accepts a parameter of type Node<T>. Which means a user can still create a tree with the wrong type of root node. How do I enforce this constraint? The only way I can think of doing is either: Do an instanceof which limits the check to runtime. I'm not a huge fan of this. Remove setRoot from the interface and have the base class implement this method. This means that it is not part of the contract and anyone who wants to make a new type of tree needs to remember to implement this method. Is there a better way? The second question I have concerns the return type of postOrder which is List<Node<T>>. This means that if a user is operating on a GenericTree<T> object and calls postOrder, he or she receives a list that consists of Node<T> objects. This means when iterating through (using a foreach construct) they would have perform an explicit cast to GenericNode<T> if they want to use methods that are only defined in that class. I don't like having to place this burden on the user. What are my options in this case? I can only think of removing the method from the interface and have the subclass implement this method making sure that it returns a list of appropriate subtype of Node<T>. However, this once again removes it from the contract and it's anyone who wants to create a new type of tree has to remember to implement this method. Is there a better way?

    Read the article

  • Why JSF Matters (to You)

    - by reza_rahman
          "Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge."                                                                                                    – Lao Tzu You may have noticed Thoughtworks recently crowned the likes AngularJS, etc imminent successors to server-side web frameworks. They apparently also deemed it necessary to single out JSF for righteous scorn. I have to say as I was reading the analysis I couldn't help but remember they also promptly jumped on the Ruby, Rails, Clojure, etc bandwagon a good few years ago seemingly similarly crowing these dynamic languages imminent successors to Java. I remember thinking then as I do now whether the folks at Thoughtworks are really that much smarter than me or if they are simply more prone to the Hipster buzz of the day. I'll let you make the final call on that one. I also noticed mention of "J2EE" in the context of JSF and had to wonder how up-to-date or knowledgeable the person writing the analysis actually was given that the term was basically retired almost a decade ago. There's one thing that I am absolutely sure about though - as a long time pretty happy user of JSF, I had no choice but to speak up on what I believe JSF offers. If you feel the same way, I would encourage you to support the team behind JSF whose hard work you may have benefited from over the years. True to his outspoken character PrimeFaces lead Cagatay Civici certainly did not mince words making the case for the JSF ecosystem - his excellent write-up is well worth a read. He specifically pointed out the practical problems in going whole hog with bare metal JavaScript, CSS, HTML for many development teams. I'll admit I had to smile when I read his closing sentence as well as the rather cheerful comments to the post from actual current JSF/PrimeFaces users that are apparently supposed to be on a gloomy death march. In a similar vein, OmniFaces developer Arjan Tijms did a great job pointing out the fact that despite the extremely competitive server-side Java Web UI space, JSF seems to manage to always consistently come out in either the number one or number two spot over many years and many data sources - do give his well-written message in the JAX-RS user forum a careful read. I don't think it's really reasonable to expect this to be the case for so many years if JSF was not at least a capable if not outstanding technology. If fact if you've ever wondered, Oracle itself is one of the largest JSF users on the planet. As Oracle's Shay Shmeltzer explains in a recent JSF Central interview, many of Oracle's strategic products such as ADF, ADF Mobile and Fusion Applications itself is built on JSF. There are well over 3,000 active developers working on these codebases. I don't think anyone can think of a more compelling reason to make sure that a technology is as effective as possible for practical development under real world conditions. Standing on the shoulders of the above giants, I feel like I can be pretty brief in making my own case for JSF: JSF is a powerful abstraction that brings the original Smalltalk MVC pattern to web development. This means cutting down boilerplate code to the bare minimum such that you really can think of just writing your view markup and then simply wire up some properties and event handlers on a POJO. The best way to see what this really means is to compare JSF code for a pretty small case to other approaches. You should then multiply the additional work for the typical enterprise project to try to understand what the productivity trade-offs are. This is reason alone for me to personally never take any other approach seriously as my primary web UI solution unless it can match the sheer productivity of JSF. Thanks to JSF's focus on components from the ground-up JSF has an extremely strong ecosystem that includes projects like PrimeFaces, RichFaces, OmniFaces, ICEFaces and of course ADF Faces/Mobile. These component libraries taken together constitute perhaps the largest widget set ever developed and optimized for a single web UI technology. To begin to grasp what this really means, just briefly browse the excellent PrimeFaces showcase and think about the fact that you can readily use the widgets on that showcase by just using some simple markup and knowing near to nothing about AJAX, JavaScript or CSS. JSF has the fair and legitimate advantage of being an open vendor neutral standard. This means that no single company, individual or insular clique controls JSF - openness, transparency, accountability, plurality, collaboration and inclusiveness is virtually guaranteed by the standards process itself. You have the option to choose between compatible implementations, escape any form of lock-in or even create your own compatible implementation! As you might gather from the quote at the top of the post, I am not a fan of crystal ball gazing and certainly don't want to engage in it myself. Who knows? However far-fetched it may seem maybe AngularJS is the only future we all have after all. If that is the case, so be it. Unlike what you might have been told, Java EE is about choice at heart and it can certainly work extremely well as a back-end for AngularJS. Likewise, you are also most certainly not limited to just JSF for working with Java EE - you have a rich set of choices like Struts 2, Vaadin, Errai, VRaptor 4, Wicket or perhaps even the new action-oriented web framework being considered for Java EE 8 based on the work in Jersey MVC... Please note that any views expressed here are my own only and certainly does not reflect the position of Oracle as a company.

    Read the article

  • The Incremental Architect&rsquo;s Napkin - #5 - Design functions for extensibility and readability

    - by Ralf Westphal
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/24/the-incremental-architectrsquos-napkin---5---design-functions-for.aspx The functionality of programs is entered via Entry Points. So what we´re talking about when designing software is a bunch of functions handling the requests represented by and flowing in through those Entry Points. Designing software thus consists of at least three phases: Analyzing the requirements to find the Entry Points and their signatures Designing the functionality to be executed when those Entry Points get triggered Implementing the functionality according to the design aka coding I presume, you´re familiar with phase 1 in some way. And I guess you´re proficient in implementing functionality in some programming language. But in my experience developers in general are not experienced in going through an explicit phase 2. “Designing functionality? What´s that supposed to mean?” you might already have thought. Here´s my definition: To design functionality (or functional design for short) means thinking about… well, functions. You find a solution for what´s supposed to happen when an Entry Point gets triggered in terms of functions. A conceptual solution that is, because those functions only exist in your head (or on paper) during this phase. But you may have guess that, because it´s “design” not “coding”. And here is, what functional design is not: It´s not about logic. Logic is expressions (e.g. +, -, && etc.) and control statements (e.g. if, switch, for, while etc.). Also I consider calling external APIs as logic. It´s equally basic. It´s what code needs to do in order to deliver some functionality or quality. Logic is what´s doing that needs to be done by software. Transformations are either done through expressions or API-calls. And then there is alternative control flow depending on the result of some expression. Basically it´s just jumps in Assembler, sometimes to go forward (if, switch), sometimes to go backward (for, while, do). But calling your own function is not logic. It´s not necessary to produce any outcome. Functionality is not enhanced by adding functions (subroutine calls) to your code. Nor is quality increased by adding functions. No performance gain, no higher scalability etc. through functions. Functions are not relevant to functionality. Strange, isn´t it. What they are important for is security of investment. By introducing functions into our code we can become more productive (re-use) and can increase evolvability (higher unterstandability, easier to keep code consistent). That´s no small feat, however. Evolvable code can hardly be overestimated. That´s why to me functional design is so important. It´s at the core of software development. To sum this up: Functional design is on a level of abstraction above (!) logical design or algorithmic design. Functional design is only done until you get to a point where each function is so simple you are very confident you can easily code it. Functional design an logical design (which mostly is coding, but can also be done using pseudo code or flow charts) are complementary. Software needs both. If you start coding right away you end up in a tangled mess very quickly. Then you need back out through refactoring. Functional design on the other hand is bloodless without actual code. It´s just a theory with no experiments to prove it. But how to do functional design? An example of functional design Let´s assume a program to de-duplicate strings. The user enters a number of strings separated by commas, e.g. a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a. And the program is supposed to clear this list of all doubles, e.g. a, b, c, d, e. There is only one Entry Point to this program: the user triggers the de-duplication by starting the program with the string list on the command line C:\>deduplicate "a, b, a, c, d, b, e, c, a" a, b, c, d, e …or by clicking on a GUI button. This leads to the Entry Point function to get called. It´s the program´s main function in case of the batch version or a button click event handler in the GUI version. That´s the physical Entry Point so to speak. It´s inevitable. What then happens is a three step process: Transform the input data from the user into a request. Call the request handler. Transform the output of the request handler into a tangible result for the user. Or to phrase it a bit more generally: Accept input. Transform input into output. Present output. This does not mean any of these steps requires a lot of effort. Maybe it´s just one line of code to accomplish it. Nevertheless it´s a distinct step in doing the processing behind an Entry Point. Call it an aspect or a responsibility - and you will realize it most likely deserves a function of its own to satisfy the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). Interestingly the above list of steps is already functional design. There is no logic, but nevertheless the solution is described - albeit on a higher level of abstraction than you might have done yourself. But it´s still on a meta-level. The application to the domain at hand is easy, though: Accept string list from command line De-duplicate Present de-duplicated strings on standard output And this concrete list of processing steps can easily be transformed into code:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var output = Deduplicate(input); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } Instead of a big problem there are three much smaller problems now. If you think each of those is trivial to implement, then go for it. You can stop the functional design at this point. But maybe, just maybe, you´re not so sure how to go about with the de-duplication for example. Then just implement what´s easy right now, e.g.private static string Accept_string_list(string[] args) { return args[0]; } private static void Present_deduplicated_string_list( string[] output) { var line = string.Join(", ", output); Console.WriteLine(line); } Accept_string_list() contains logic in the form of an API-call. Present_deduplicated_string_list() contains logic in the form of an expression and an API-call. And then repeat the functional design for the remaining processing step. What´s left is the domain logic: de-duplicating a list of strings. How should that be done? Without any logic at our disposal during functional design you´re left with just functions. So which functions could make up the de-duplication? Here´s a suggestion: De-duplicate Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Processing step 2 obviously was the core of the solution. That´s where real creativity was needed. That´s the core of the domain. But now after this refinement the implementation of each step is easy again:private static string[] Parse_string_list(string input) { return input.Split(',') .Select(s => s.Trim()) .ToArray(); } private static Dictionary<string,object> Compile_unique_strings(string[] strings) { return strings.Aggregate( new Dictionary<string, object>(), (agg, s) => { agg[s] = null; return agg; }); } private static string[] Serialize_unique_strings( Dictionary<string,object> dict) { return dict.Keys.ToArray(); } With these three additional functions Main() now looks like this:static void Main(string[] args) { var input = Accept_string_list(args); var strings = Parse_string_list(input); var dict = Compile_unique_strings(strings); var output = Serialize_unique_strings(dict); Present_deduplicated_string_list(output); } I think that´s very understandable code: just read it from top to bottom and you know how the solution to the problem works. It´s a mirror image of the initial design: Accept string list from command line Parse the input string into a true list of strings. Register each string in a dictionary/map/set. That way duplicates get cast away. Transform the data structure into a list of unique strings. Present de-duplicated strings on standard output You can even re-generate the design by just looking at the code. Code and functional design thus are always in sync - if you follow some simple rules. But about that later. And as a bonus: all the functions making up the process are small - which means easy to understand, too. So much for an initial concrete example. Now it´s time for some theory. Because there is method to this madness ;-) The above has only scratched the surface. Introducing Flow Design Functional design starts with a given function, the Entry Point. Its goal is to describe the behavior of the program when the Entry Point is triggered using a process, not an algorithm. An algorithm consists of logic, a process on the other hand consists just of steps or stages. Each processing step transforms input into output or a side effect. Also it might access resources, e.g. a printer, a database, or just memory. Processing steps thus can rely on state of some sort. This is different from Functional Programming, where functions are supposed to not be stateful and not cause side effects.[1] In its simplest form a process can be written as a bullet point list of steps, e.g. Get data from user Output result to user Transform data Parse data Map result for output Such a compilation of steps - possibly on different levels of abstraction - often is the first artifact of functional design. It can be generated by a team in an initial design brainstorming. Next comes ordering the steps. What should happen first, what next etc.? Get data from user Parse data Transform data Map result for output Output result to user That´s great for a start into functional design. It´s better than starting to code right away on a given function using TDD. Please get me right: TDD is a valuable practice. But it can be unnecessarily hard if the scope of a functionn is too large. But how do you know beforehand without investing some thinking? And how to do this thinking in a systematic fashion? My recommendation: For any given function you´re supposed to implement first do a functional design. Then, once you´re confident you know the processing steps - which are pretty small - refine and code them using TDD. You´ll see that´s much, much easier - and leads to cleaner code right away. For more information on this approach I call “Informed TDD” read my book of the same title. Thinking before coding is smart. And writing down the solution as a bunch of functions possibly is the simplest thing you can do, I´d say. It´s more according to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle than returning constants or other trivial stuff TDD development often is started with. So far so good. A simple ordered list of processing steps will do to start with functional design. As shown in the above example such steps can easily be translated into functions. Moving from design to coding thus is simple. However, such a list does not scale. Processing is not always that simple to be captured in a list. And then the list is just text. Again. Like code. That means the design is lacking visuality. Textual representations need more parsing by your brain than visual representations. Plus they are limited in their “dimensionality”: text just has one dimension, it´s sequential. Alternatives and parallelism are hard to encode in text. In addition the functional design using numbered lists lacks data. It´s not visible what´s the input, output, and state of the processing steps. That´s why functional design should be done using a lightweight visual notation. No tool is necessary to draw such designs. Use pen and paper; a flipchart, a whiteboard, or even a napkin is sufficient. Visualizing processes The building block of the functional design notation is a functional unit. I mostly draw it like this: Something is done, it´s clear what goes in, it´s clear what comes out, and it´s clear what the processing step requires in terms of state or hardware. Whenever input flows into a functional unit it gets processed and output is produced and/or a side effect occurs. Flowing data is the driver of something happening. That´s why I call this approach to functional design Flow Design. It´s about data flow instead of control flow. Control flow like in algorithms is of no concern to functional design. Thinking about control flow simply is too low level. Once you start with control flow you easily get bogged down by tons of details. That´s what you want to avoid during design. Design is supposed to be quick, broad brush, abstract. It should give overview. But what about all the details? As Robert C. Martin rightly said: “Programming is abot detail”. Detail is a matter of code. Once you start coding the processing steps you designed you can worry about all the detail you want. Functional design does not eliminate all the nitty gritty. It just postpones tackling them. To me that´s also an example of the SRP. Function design has the responsibility to come up with a solution to a problem posed by a single function (Entry Point). And later coding has the responsibility to implement the solution down to the last detail (i.e. statement, API-call). TDD unfortunately mixes both responsibilities. It´s just coding - and thereby trying to find detailed implementations (green phase) plus getting the design right (refactoring). To me that´s one reason why TDD has failed to deliver on its promise for many developers. Using functional units as building blocks of functional design processes can be depicted very easily. Here´s the initial process for the example problem: For each processing step draw a functional unit and label it. Choose a verb or an “action phrase” as a label, not a noun. Functional design is about activities, not state or structure. Then make the output of an upstream step the input of a downstream step. Finally think about the data that should flow between the functional units. Write the data above the arrows connecting the functional units in the direction of the data flow. Enclose the data description in brackets. That way you can clearly see if all flows have already been specified. Empty brackets mean “no data is flowing”, but nevertheless a signal is sent. A name like “list” or “strings” in brackets describes the data content. Use lower case labels for that purpose. A name starting with an upper case letter like “String” or “Customer” on the other hand signifies a data type. If you like, you also can combine descriptions with data types by separating them with a colon, e.g. (list:string) or (strings:string[]). But these are just suggestions from my practice with Flow Design. You can do it differently, if you like. Just be sure to be consistent. Flows wired-up in this manner I call one-dimensional (1D). Each functional unit just has one input and/or one output. A functional unit without an output is possible. It´s like a black hole sucking up input without producing any output. Instead it produces side effects. A functional unit without an input, though, does make much sense. When should it start to work? What´s the trigger? That´s why in the above process even the first processing step has an input. If you like, view such 1D-flows as pipelines. Data is flowing through them from left to right. But as you can see, it´s not always the same data. It get´s transformed along its passage: (args) becomes a (list) which is turned into (strings). The Principle of Mutual Oblivion A very characteristic trait of flows put together from function units is: no functional units knows another one. They are all completely independent of each other. Functional units don´t know where their input is coming from (or even when it´s gonna arrive). They just specify a range of values they can process. And they promise a certain behavior upon input arriving. Also they don´t know where their output is going. They just produce it in their own time independent of other functional units. That means at least conceptually all functional units work in parallel. Functional units don´t know their “deployment context”. They now nothing about the overall flow they are place in. They are just consuming input from some upstream, and producing output for some downstream. That makes functional units very easy to test. At least as long as they don´t depend on state or resources. I call this the Principle of Mutual Oblivion (PoMO). Functional units are oblivious of others as well as an overall context/purpose. They are just parts of a whole focused on a single responsibility. How the whole is built, how a larger goal is achieved, is of no concern to the single functional units. By building software in such a manner, functional design interestingly follows nature. Nature´s building blocks for organisms also follow the PoMO. The cells forming your body do not know each other. Take a nerve cell “controlling” a muscle cell for example:[2] The nerve cell does not know anything about muscle cells, let alone the specific muscel cell it is “attached to”. Likewise the muscle cell does not know anything about nerve cells, let a lone a specific nerve cell “attached to” it. Saying “the nerve cell is controlling the muscle cell” thus only makes sense when viewing both from the outside. “Control” is a concept of the whole, not of its parts. Control is created by wiring-up parts in a certain way. Both cells are mutually oblivious. Both just follow a contract. One produces Acetylcholine (ACh) as output, the other consumes ACh as input. Where the ACh is going, where it´s coming from neither cell cares about. Million years of evolution have led to this kind of division of labor. And million years of evolution have produced organism designs (DNA) which lead to the production of these different cell types (and many others) and also to their co-location. The result: the overall behavior of an organism. How and why this happened in nature is a mystery. For our software, though, it´s clear: functional and quality requirements needs to be fulfilled. So we as developers have to become “intelligent designers” of “software cells” which we put together to form a “software organism” which responds in satisfying ways to triggers from it´s environment. My bet is: If nature gets complex organisms working by following the PoMO, who are we to not apply this recipe for success to our much simpler “machines”? So my rule is: Wherever there is functionality to be delivered, because there is a clear Entry Point into software, design the functionality like nature would do it. Build it from mutually oblivious functional units. That´s what Flow Design is about. In that way it´s even universal, I´d say. Its notation can also be applied to biology: Never mind labeling the functional units with nouns. That´s ok in Flow Design. You´ll do that occassionally for functional units on a higher level of abstraction or when their purpose is close to hardware. Getting a cockroach to roam your bedroom takes 1,000,000 nerve cells (neurons). Getting the de-duplication program to do its job just takes 5 “software cells” (functional units). Both, though, follow the same basic principle. Translating functional units into code Moving from functional design to code is no rocket science. In fact it´s straightforward. There are two simple rules: Translate an input port to a function. Translate an output port either to a return statement in that function or to a function pointer visible to that function. The simplest translation of a functional unit is a function. That´s what you saw in the above example. Functions are mutually oblivious. That why Functional Programming likes them so much. It makes them composable. Which is the reason, nature works according to the PoMO. Let´s be clear about one thing: There is no dependency injection in nature. For all of an organism´s complexity no DI container is used. Behavior is the result of smooth cooperation between mutually oblivious building blocks. Functions will often be the adequate translation for the functional units in your designs. But not always. Take for example the case, where a processing step should not always produce an output. Maybe the purpose is to filter input. Here the functional unit consumes words and produces words. But it does not pass along every word flowing in. Some words are swallowed. Think of a spell checker. It probably should not check acronyms for correctness. There are too many of them. Or words with no more than two letters. Such words are called “stop words”. In the above picture the optionality of the output is signified by the astrisk outside the brackets. It means: Any number of (word) data items can flow from the functional unit for each input data item. It might be none or one or even more. This I call a stream of data. Such behavior cannot be translated into a function where output is generated with return. Because a function always needs to return a value. So the output port is translated into a function pointer or continuation which gets passed to the subroutine when called:[3]void filter_stop_words( string word, Action<string> onNoStopWord) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } If you want to be nitpicky you might call such a function pointer parameter an injection. And technically you´re right. Conceptually, though, it´s not an injection. Because the subroutine is not functionally dependent on the continuation. Firstly continuations are procedures, i.e. subroutines without a return type. Remember: Flow Design is about unidirectional data flow. Secondly the name of the formal parameter is chosen in a way as to not assume anything about downstream processing steps. onNoStopWord describes a situation (or event) within the functional unit only. Translating output ports into function pointers helps keeping functional units mutually oblivious in cases where output is optional or produced asynchronically. Either pass the function pointer to the function upon call. Or make it global by putting it on the encompassing class. Then it´s called an event. In C# that´s even an explicit feature.class Filter { public void filter_stop_words( string word) { if (...check if not a stop word...) onNoStopWord(word); } public event Action<string> onNoStopWord; } When to use a continuation and when to use an event dependens on how a functional unit is used in flows and how it´s packed together with others into classes. You´ll see examples further down the Flow Design road. Another example of 1D functional design Let´s see Flow Design once more in action using the visual notation. How about the famous word wrap kata? Robert C. Martin has posted a much cited solution including an extensive reasoning behind his TDD approach. So maybe you want to compare it to Flow Design. The function signature given is:string WordWrap(string text, int maxLineLength) {...} That´s not an Entry Point since we don´t see an application with an environment and users. Nevertheless it´s a function which is supposed to provide a certain functionality. The text passed in has to be reformatted. The input is a single line of arbitrary length consisting of words separated by spaces. The output should consist of one or more lines of a maximum length specified. If a word is longer than a the maximum line length it can be split in multiple parts each fitting in a line. Flow Design Let´s start by brainstorming the process to accomplish the feat of reformatting the text. What´s needed? Words need to be assembled into lines Words need to be extracted from the input text The resulting lines need to be assembled into the output text Words too long to fit in a line need to be split Does sound about right? I guess so. And it shows a kind of priority. Long words are a special case. So maybe there is a hint for an incremental design here. First let´s tackle “average words” (words not longer than a line). Here´s the Flow Design for this increment: The the first three bullet points turned into functional units with explicit data added. As the signature requires a text is transformed into another text. See the input of the first functional unit and the output of the last functional unit. In between no text flows, but words and lines. That´s good to see because thereby the domain is clearly represented in the design. The requirements are talking about words and lines and here they are. But note the asterisk! It´s not outside the brackets but inside. That means it´s not a stream of words or lines, but lists or sequences. For each text a sequence of words is output. For each sequence of words a sequence of lines is produced. The asterisk is used to abstract from the concrete implementation. Like with streams. Whether the list of words gets implemented as an array or an IEnumerable is not important during design. It´s an implementation detail. Does any processing step require further refinement? I don´t think so. They all look pretty “atomic” to me. And if not… I can always backtrack and refine a process step using functional design later once I´ve gained more insight into a sub-problem. Implementation The implementation is straightforward as you can imagine. The processing steps can all be translated into functions. Each can be tested easily and separately. Each has a focused responsibility. And the process flow becomes just a sequence of function calls: Easy to understand. It clearly states how word wrapping works - on a high level of abstraction. And it´s easy to evolve as you´ll see. Flow Design - Increment 2 So far only texts consisting of “average words” are wrapped correctly. Words not fitting in a line will result in lines too long. Wrapping long words is a feature of the requested functionality. Whether it´s there or not makes a difference to the user. To quickly get feedback I decided to first implement a solution without this feature. But now it´s time to add it to deliver the full scope. Fortunately Flow Design automatically leads to code following the Open Closed Principle (OCP). It´s easy to extend it - instead of changing well tested code. How´s that possible? Flow Design allows for extension of functionality by inserting functional units into the flow. That way existing functional units need not be changed. The data flow arrow between functional units is a natural extension point. No need to resort to the Strategy Pattern. No need to think ahead where extions might need to be made in the future. I just “phase in” the remaining processing step: Since neither Extract words nor Reformat know of their environment neither needs to be touched due to the “detour”. The new processing step accepts the output of the existing upstream step and produces data compatible with the existing downstream step. Implementation - Increment 2 A trivial implementation checking the assumption if this works does not do anything to split long words. The input is just passed on: Note how clean WordWrap() stays. The solution is easy to understand. A developer looking at this code sometime in the future, when a new feature needs to be build in, quickly sees how long words are dealt with. Compare this to Robert C. Martin´s solution:[4] How does this solution handle long words? Long words are not even part of the domain language present in the code. At least I need considerable time to understand the approach. Admittedly the Flow Design solution with the full implementation of long word splitting is longer than Robert C. Martin´s. At least it seems. Because his solution does not cover all the “word wrap situations” the Flow Design solution handles. Some lines would need to be added to be on par, I guess. But even then… Is a difference in LOC that important as long as it´s in the same ball park? I value understandability and openness for extension higher than saving on the last line of code. Simplicity is not just less code, it´s also clarity in design. But don´t take my word for it. Try Flow Design on larger problems and compare for yourself. What´s the easier, more straightforward way to clean code? And keep in mind: You ain´t seen all yet ;-) There´s more to Flow Design than described in this chapter. In closing I hope I was able to give you a impression of functional design that makes you hungry for more. To me it´s an inevitable step in software development. Jumping from requirements to code does not scale. And it leads to dirty code all to quickly. Some thought should be invested first. Where there is a clear Entry Point visible, it´s functionality should be designed using data flows. Because with data flows abstraction is possible. For more background on why that´s necessary read my blog article here. For now let me point out to you - if you haven´t already noticed - that Flow Design is a general purpose declarative language. It´s “programming by intention” (Shalloway et al.). Just write down how you think the solution should work on a high level of abstraction. This breaks down a large problem in smaller problems. And by following the PoMO the solutions to those smaller problems are independent of each other. So they are easy to test. Or you could even think about getting them implemented in parallel by different team members. Flow Design not only increases evolvability, but also helps becoming more productive. All team members can participate in functional design. This goes beyon collective code ownership. We´re talking collective design/architecture ownership. Because with Flow Design there is a common visual language to talk about functional design - which is the foundation for all other design activities.   PS: If you like what you read, consider getting my ebook “The Incremental Architekt´s Napkin”. It´s where I compile all the articles in this series for easier reading. I like the strictness of Function Programming - but I also find it quite hard to live by. And it certainly is not what millions of programmers are used to. Also to me it seems, the real world is full of state and side effects. So why give them such a bad image? That´s why functional design takes a more pragmatic approach. State and side effects are ok for processing steps - but be sure to follow the SRP. Don´t put too much of it into a single processing step. ? Image taken from www.physioweb.org ? My code samples are written in C#. C# sports typed function pointers called delegates. Action is such a function pointer type matching functions with signature void someName(T t). Other languages provide similar ways to work with functions as first class citizens - even Java now in version 8. I trust you find a way to map this detail of my translation to your favorite programming language. I know it works for Java, C++, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Go. And if you´re using a Functional Programming language it´s of course a no brainer. ? Taken from his blog post “The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path”. ?

    Read the article

  • Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining weight: Examples of certified add-on's

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    The Fusion CRM ISV program is gaining traction. Please find below few examples of the partners having certified their add-on's to seamlessly work on top of Oracle Fusion CRM. For more information, please contact [email protected] ·         Opportunity-to-Quote.  Big Machines now integrates seamlessly to Oracle Fusion CRM, enabling customers with complex products and services and multiple sales channels to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote process, including product selection, configuration, pricing, quoting, and approval workflows.  Create a custom hyperlink in the Opportunity to invoke Big Machines CPQ application to create a quote and sync up with the Fusion CRM custom quote object using the CRUD operations. The quote can be updated using the custom button in the custom tab in the opportunity details. See: http://www.bigmachines.com/oracle.php  ·         SaaS Billing and Subscription Management.  Is your prospect/customer asking whether top billing partners support Fusion CRM?  Positioning an integrated CRM solution for billing usage and subscription based services?  Need to implement a billable solution on the Oracle Java Cloud Service?  Aria Systems and Zuora have recently engaged with Oracle to deepen their integrations to Fusion CRM and team with Oracle for joint opportunities.  ·         Google Apps, SharePoint, Email-CRM Integrations o   Do your prospects use Google Apps in their business operations?  A “Best of AppExchange” award winner recently completed their integration for Fusion CRM.  CirrusInsight plugs Fusion CRM web services directly into Gmail, allowing you to search existing opportunity or contact, provide account information, and create an interaction such as phone call, appointment, or email against a customer or contact in Fusion CRM directly from Gmail.  o   An EMEA / France based partner, Aryvart provides bi-directional synchronization of appointments and tasks between Google calendar and Oracle Fusion CRM. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to use Google calendar for appointments. o   Looking to lower the barrier and expand in SharePoint accounts?  InFact Group (EMEA / France & Germany) provides Microsoft SharePoint Connector for Oracle Fusion CRM. With this solution, you can store documents attached to an opportunity, into Microsoft SharePoint repository. For customers, it means adopting Oracle Fusion CRM while continuing to collaborate across existing content management infrastructure. o   Need to connect to MacMail, GroupWise, or Outlook/Exchange?  Omni Technology is a partner whose Riva CRM Integration recently engaged for support Fusion CRM as a key platform. Migration Tools from competitive CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  Data Migration Tools from legacy CRMs, to Oracle Fusion CRM.  A partner with the tools and techniques to speed adoption, Conemis provides data integration tools to export data from legacy CRM, and import into Oracle Fusion CRM via WebServices APIs. For customers, it means reducing cost of data migration from legacy CRM system into Oracle Fusion CRM. 

    Read the article

  • Cross platform application revolution

    - by anirudha
    Every developer know that if they make a windows application that they work only on windows. that’s a small pity thing we all know. this is a lose point for windows application who make developer thing small means only for windows and other only for mac. this is a big point behind success of web because who purchase a operating system if they want to use a application on other platform. why they purchase when they can’t try them. that’s a thing better in Web means IE 6 no problem IE 6 to IE 8 chrome to chrome 8 Firefox to Firefox 3.6.13 even that’s beta no problem the good website is shown as same as other browser. some minor difference may be can see. the cross platform application development thinking is much big then making a application who is only for some audience. the difference between audience make by OS what they use Windows or mac. if they use mac they can’t use this they use windows they can’t use this. Web for Everyone starting from a children to grandfather. male and female Everyone can use internet.no worrying what you have even you have Windows or mac , any browser even as silly IE 6. the cross platform have a good thing that “People”. everyone can use them without a problem that. just like some time problem come in windows that “some component is missing click here to get them” , you can’t use this [apps] software because you have windows sp1 , sp2  sp3. you need to install this first before this. this stupidity mainly comes in Microsoft software. in last year i found a issue on WPI that they force user to install another software when they get them from WPI. ex:- you need to install Visual studio 2008 before installing Visual studio 2010 express. are anyone tell me why user get old version 2008 when they get latest and express version. i never try again their to check the issue is solved or not. a another thing is you can’t get IE 9 on windows XP version. in that’case don’t thing and worrying about them because Firefox and Chrome is much better. the stupidity from Microsoft is too much. they never told you about Firebug even sometime they discuss about damage tool in IE they called them developer tool because they are Microsoft and they only thing how they can market their products. you need to install many thing without any reason such as many SQL server component even you use other RDBMS. you can’t say no to them because you need a tool and tool require a useless component called SQL server. i never found any software force me to install this for this and this for this before install me. that’s another good thing in WEB that no thing require i means you not need to install dotnet framework 4 before enjoy facebook or twitter. may be you found out that Microsoft's fail project Window planet force you to get silverlight before going their. i never hear about them. some month ago my friend talked to me about them i found nothing better their. Wha’t user do when facebook force user to install silverlight or adobe flash or may be Microsoft dotnet framework 4. if you not install them facebook tell  you bye bye tata ! never come here before installing Microsoft dotnet framework 4. the door is open for you after installing them not before. the story is same as “ tell me sorry before coming in home” as mother says to their child when they do something wrong. the web never force you to do something for them. sometime they allow you to use other website account their that’s very fast login for you. because they know the importance of your time.

    Read the article

  • Big Data – Basics of Big Data Analytics – Day 18 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the various components in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what are the various analytics tasks we try to achieve with the Big Data and the list of the important tools in Big Data Story. When you have plenty of the data around you what is the first thing which comes to your mind? “What do all these data means?” Exactly – the same thought comes to my mind as well. I always wanted to know what all the data means and what meaningful information I can receive out of it. Most of the Big Data projects are built to retrieve various intelligence all this data contains within it. Let us take example of Facebook. When I look at my friends list of Facebook, I always want to ask many questions such as - On which date my maximum friends have a birthday? What is the most favorite film of my most of the friends so I can talk about it and engage them? What is the most liked placed to travel my friends? Which is the most disliked cousin for my friends in India and USA so when they travel, I do not take them there. There are many more questions I can think of. This illustrates that how important it is to have analysis of Big Data. Here are few of the kind of analysis listed which you can use with Big Data. Slicing and Dicing: This means breaking down your data into smaller set and understanding them one set at a time. This also helps to present various information in a variety of different user digestible ways. For example if you have data related to movies, you can use different slide and dice data in various formats like actors, movie length etc. Real Time Monitoring: This is very crucial in social media when there are any events happening and you wanted to measure the impact at the time when the event is happening. For example, if you are using twitter when there is a football match, you can watch what fans are talking about football match on twitter when the event is happening. Anomaly Predication and Modeling: If the business is running normal it is alright but if there are signs of trouble, everyone wants to know them early on the hand. Big Data analysis of various patterns can be very much helpful to predict future. Though it may not be always accurate but certain hints and signals can be very helpful. For example, lots of data can help conclude that if there is lots of rain it can increase the sell of umbrella. Text and Unstructured Data Analysis: unstructured data are now getting norm in the new world and they are a big part of the Big Data revolution. It is very important that we Extract, Transform and Load the unstructured data and make meaningful data out of it. For example, analysis of lots of images, one can predict that people like to use certain colors in certain months in their cloths. Big Data Analytics Solutions There are many different Big Data Analystics Solutions out in the market. It is impossible to list all of them so I will list a few of them over here. Tableau – This has to be one of the most popular visualization tools out in the big data market. SAS – A high performance analytics and infrastructure company IBM and Oracle – They have a range of tools for Big Data Analysis Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Data Scientist. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Introduction to Big Data – Guest Post

    - by pinaldave
    BIG Data – such a big word – everybody talks about this now a days. It is the word in the database world. In one of the conversation I asked my friend Jasjeet Sigh the same question – what is Big Data? He instantly came up with a very effective write-up.  Jasjeet is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. He leads the SQL domain, and holds rich IT industry experience. Talking about Koenig, it is a 19 year old IT training company that offers several certification choices. Some of its courses include SharePoint Training, Project Management certifications, Microsoft Trainings, Business Intelligence programs, Web Design and Development courses etc. Big Data, as the name suggests, is about data that is BIG in nature. The data is BIG in terms of size, and it is difficult to manage such enormous data with relational database management systems that are quite popular these days. Big Data is not just about being large in size, it is also about the variety of the data that differs in form or type. Some examples of Big Data are given below : Scientific data related to weather and atmosphere, Genetics etc Data collected by various medical procedures, such as Radiology, CT scan, MRI etc Data related to Global Positioning System Pictures and Videos Radio Frequency Data Data that may vary very rapidly like stock exchange information Apart from difficulties in managing and storing such data, it is difficult to query, analyze and visualize it. The characteristics of Big Data can be defined by four Vs: Volume: It simply means a large volume of data that may span Petabyte, Exabyte and so on. However it also depends organization to organization that what volume of data they consider as Big Data. Variety: As discussed above, Big Data is not limited to relational information or structured Data. It can also include unstructured data like pictures, videos, text, audio etc. Velocity:  Velocity means the speed by which data changes. The higher is the velocity, the more efficient should be the system to capture and analyze the data. Missing any important point may lead to wrong analysis or may even result in loss. Veracity: It has been recently added as the fourth V, and generally means truthfulness or adherence to the truth. In terms of Big Data, it is more of a challenge than a characteristic. It is difficult to ascertain the truth out of the enormous amount of data and the one that has high velocity. There are always chances of having un-precise and uncertain data. It is a challenging task to clean such data before it is analyzed. Big Data can be considered as the next big thing in the IT sector in terms of innovation and development. If appropriate technologies are developed to analyze and use the information, it can be the driving force for almost all industrial segments. These include Retail, Manufacturing, Service, Finance, Healthcare etc. This will help them to automate business decisions, increase productivity, and innovate and develop new products. Thanks Jasjeet Singh for an excellent write up.  Jasjeet Sign is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Database, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Big Data

    Read the article

  • Know Your Service Request Status

    - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team
    Untitled Document To monitor a Service Request or not to monitor a Service Request... That should never be the question Monitoring the Service Requests you create is an essential part of the process to resolve your issue when you work with a Support Engineer. If you monitor your Service Request, you know at all times where it is in the process, or to be more specific, you know at all times what action the Support Engineer has taken on your request and what the next step is. When you think about it, it is rather simple... Oracle Support is working the issue, Oracle Development is working the issue, or you are. When you check on the status, you may find that the Support Engineer has a question for you or the engineer is waiting for more information to resolve the issue. If you monitor the Service Request, and respond quickly, the process keeps moving, and you’ll get your answer more quickly. Monitoring a Service Request is easy. All you need to do is check the status codes that the Support Engineer or the system assigns to your Service Request. These status codes are not static. You will see that during the life of your Service request, it will go through a variety of status codes. The best advice I can offer you when you monitor your Service Request is to watch the codes. If the status is not changing, or if you are not getting responses back within the agreed timeframes, you should review the action plan the Support Engineer has outlined or talk about a new action plan. Here are the most common status codes: Work in Progress indicates that your Support Engineer is researching and working the issue. Development Working means that you have a code related issue and Oracle Support has submitted a bug to Development. Please pay a particular attention to the following statuses; they indicate that the Support Engineer is waiting for a response from you: Customer Working usually means that your Support Engineer needs you to collect additional information, needs you to try something or to apply a patch, or has more questions for you. Solution Offered indicates that the Support Engineer has identified the problem and has provided you with a solution. Auto-Close or Close Initiated are statuses you don’t want to see. Monitoring your Service Request helps prevent your issues from reaching these statuses. They usually indicate that the Support Engineer did not receive the requested information or action from you. This is important. If you fail to respond, the Support Engineer will attempt to contact you three times over a two-week period. If these attempts are unsuccessful, he or she will initiate the Auto-Close process. At the end of this additional two-week period, if you have not updated the Service Request, your Service Request is considered abandoned and the Support Engineer will assign a Customer Abandoned status. A Support Engineer doesn’t like to see this status, since he or she has been working to solve your issue, but we know our customers dislike it even more, since it means their issue is not moving forward. You can avoid delays in resolving your issue by monitoring your Service Request and acting quickly when you see the status change. Respond to the request from the engineer to answer questions, collect information, or to try the offered solution. Then the Support Engineer can continue working the issue and the Service Request keeps moving forward towards resolution. Keep in mind that if you take an extended period of time to respond to a request or to provide the information requested, the Support Engineer cannot take the next step. You may inadvertently send an implicit message about the problem’s urgency that may not match the Service Request priority, and your need for an answer. Help us help you. We want to get you the answer as quickly as possible so you can stay focused on your company’s objectives. Now, back to our initial question. To monitor Service Requests or not to monitor Service Requests? I think the answer is clear: yes, monitor your Service Request to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

    Read the article

  • Meet Matthijs, Dutch Inside Sales Representative for Oracle Direct

    - by Maria Sandu
    Today we would like to share some information around the Dutch Core Technology team in Malaga. Matthijs is one of the team members who decided to relocate from the Netherlands to Malaga to join Oracle Direct two years ago. Matthijs: “For the past two years I have been working as an Oracle Direct Core Technology Inside Sales representative for Named Accounts in the Netherlands, based in Malaga, Spain. In my case, working for the Dutch OD Core Technology team means that I am responsible for the Account Management of Larger companies in the Travel & Transportation and the Manufacturing, Retail & Distribution sector. I work together with the Oracle Field Account Managers and our Field Sales Management in the Netherlands where I am often the main point of contact for customers. This means that I deal with their requests and I manage their various issues, provide solutions and suggestions based on the Oracle Core Technology portfolio. I work on interesting projects with end-customers, making financial proposals and building business cases. It is a very interesting sales environment and for the last two years I improved my skills substantially. This month I will finish my Inside Sales career in Malaga to move to a position within Field Sales in the Netherlands. Oracle Direct has proven to be a great stepping stone for my career. Boost your personal development One of the reasons for joining Oracle was to boost my personal & career development. You can choose from various different trainings to follow all over Europe which enable you to reach both your personal and professional goals. Furthermore, you can decide your own career path and plan the steps necessary to achieve your goal. Many people aim to grow into Field Sales in their native countries, Business Development or Sales Management, but there are many possibilities once you decide to join Oracle. Overall, working at Oracle means working for an international company and one of the worldwide leaders in Enterprise Hardware & Software. Here you get all the tools necessary to develop yourself personally & professionally. Another great advantage of working for Oracle Direct is working from our office in Malaga, Southern Spain where we have over 400 employees from many countries across EMEA. It is a truly international environment! Working and living in Spain gives you an excellent opportunity to learn Spanish and of course enjoy the Spanish lifestyle, cuisine, beaches and much, much more!” Interview day Utrecht If you are inspired by the story of Matthijs and would like to explore the opportunity to join the Technology Sales team for the Dutch market in Malaga, let us know! We will organise an Interview day in the Oracle office in Utrecht on the 18th and 19th of September. We currently have multiple openings in the Core Technology team that focus on selling our Database portfolio in the Dutch market. We are looking for native Dutch speakers with a Bachelors degree, 2-5 years sales experience (ideally in IT) who are willing to relocate to Malaga for at least 2 years! For more information please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

    Read the article

  • Algorithm for autocomplete?

    - by StackUnderflow
    I am referring to the algorithm that is used to give query suggestions when a user type a search term in google. I am mainly interested in how google algorithm is able to show: 1. Most important results (most likely queries rather than anything that matches) 2. Match substrings 3. Fuzzy matches I know you could use Trie or generalized trie to find matches but it wouldn't meet the above requirements... Similar questions asked earlier here Thanks

    Read the article

  • My images are blurry! Why isn't WPF's SnapsToDevicePixels working?

    - by Zack Peterson
    I'm using some Images in my WPF applcation. XAML: <Image Name="ImageOrderedList" Source="images/OrderedList.png" ToolTip="Ordered List" Margin="0,0,5,5" Width="20" Height="20" SnapsToDevicePixels="True" MouseUp="Image_MouseUp" MouseEnter="Image_MouseEnter" MouseLeave="Image_MouseLeave" /> But, they appear fuzzy: Here's a zoomed-in, side-by-side comparison. An original is on the left: Why doesn't that SnapsToDevicePixels="True" line prevent this problem?

    Read the article

  • A taxonomy of web frameworks?

    - by Rob
    There seem to be several different categories of web frameworks, e.g. MVC, component based, event-driven, action-based, etc. I can't find a comprehensive list of categories and definitions anywhere. (I dare not ask for examples as well.) Is there a general taxonomy of web application frameworks somewhere, or is this too fuzzy a question to allow for definitive answers?

    Read the article

  • Use case of Glass Pane vs. Layered Pane

    - by Amanda S
    I've always been a little fuzzy on the difference between the glass pane and a layered pane. Is the glass pane essentially just "the very top layer of the root pane," or does it behave differently? When would you use a layered pane instead of the glass pane?

    Read the article

  • Classification of relationships in words?

    - by C.
    Hi, I'm not sure whats the best algorithm to use for the classification of relationships in words. For example in the case of a sentence such as "The yellow sun" there is a relationship between yellow and sun. THe machine learning techniques I have considered so far are Baynesian Statistics, Rough Sets, Fuzzy Logic, Hidden markov model and Artificial Neural Networks. Any suggestions please? thank you :)

    Read the article

  • Are there public domain collections of translations for strings commonly used in software applicatio

    - by Malcolm
    It seems to me that there must be some public domain collection of gettext compatible PO files that we could search for 1:1 or fuzzy translations for strings commonly used in software applications? Is there a technical and copyright friendly way to query services like Google's Translator Toolkit, LaunchPad, Mygengo, etc. to find translations for common strings? Thank you, Malcolm

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25  | Next Page >