Search Results

Search found 5166 results on 207 pages for 'cost benefit'.

Page 196/207 | < Previous Page | 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203  | Next Page >

• Search engine solution for Django that actually works?

  - by prometheus

  The story so far: Decided to go with Xapian as search backend because it has all search-engine features I was looking for, knows about Unicode, stemming, has few dependencies and requires no bloated app-server installation on top of it. Tried Django and Haystack (plus xapian-haystack, the backend glue code to tie Haystack to Xapian) because it was advertised on quite some blogs as "working". Did not work. Neither django-haystack nor the xapian-haystack project provide a version combination that actually works together. MASTER from both projects yields an error from Xapian, so it's not stable at all. Haystack 1.0.1 and xapian-haystack 1.0.x/1.1.0 are not API-compatible. Plus, in a minimally working installation of Haystack 1.0.1 and xapian-haystack MASTER, any complex query yields zero results due to errors in either django-haystack or xapian-haystack (I double-verified this), maybe because the unit-tests actually test very simple cases, and no edge-cases at all. Tried Djapian. The source-code is riddled with spelling errors (mind you, in variable names, not comments), documentation is also riddled with ambiguities and outdated information that will never lead to a working installation. Not surprisingly, users rarely ask for features but how to get it working in the first place. Next on the plate: exploring Solr (installing a Java environment plus Tomcat gives me headaches, the machine is RAM- and CPU-constrained), or Lucene (slightly less headaches, but still). Before I proceed spending more time with a solution that might or might not work as advertised, I'd like to know: Did anyone ever get an actual, real-world search solution working in Django? I'm serious. I find it really frustrating reading about "large problems mostly solved", and then realizing that you will never get a working installation from the source-code because, actually, all bloggers dealing with those "mostly solved problems" never went past basic installation and copy-pasting the official tutorials. So here are the requirements: must be able to search for 10-100 terms in one query must handle + (term must be present) and - (term must not be present), AND/OR must handle arbitrary grouping (i.e. parentheses around AND/OR) must allow for Django-ORM filtering before or after fulltext-search (i.e. pre-/post-processing of results with the full set of filters that Django knows about) alternatively, there must be a facility to bulk-fetch the result set and transform it into a QuerySet should be light on the machine, so preferably no humongous JVM and Java-based app-server installation Is there anything out there that does this? I'm not interested in anecdotal evidence, or references to some blog posts that claim it should be working. I'd like to hear from someone who actually has a fully-functional setup working in the real world, under real conditions, with real queries. EDIT: Let me repeat again that I'm not so much interested in anecdotal evidence that someone, somewhere has a somewhat running installation working with unspecified properties. I already went there, I read all the blog posts, mailing lists, I contacted the authors, but when it came to actual implementation of real-world scenarios, nothing ever worked as advertised. Also, and a user below brought that point up as well, considering the TCO of any project, I'm definitely not interested in hearing that someone, somewhere was able to pull it off once a vendor parachuted in an unknown number of specialists to monkey-patch the whole installation with specific domain-knowledge that's documented nowhere. So, please, if you claim you have a working installation that actually satisfies minimum requirements for a full-fledged search (see requirements above), please provide the following so that we can all benefit from a search solution for Django that actually solves the problem: exact Linux distribution, release version, exact release version of Haystack (or equivalent) and release version of search backend, exact release version of the search engine publicly (!) available documentation how to set up all components exactly in the way that your installation was set up such that the minimal requirements above are met. Thank you.

  Read the article

• Managing highly repetitive code and documentation in Java

  - by polygenelubricants

  Highly repetitive code is generally a bad thing, and there are design patterns that can help minimize this. However, sometimes it's simply inevitable due to the constraints of the language itself. Take the following example from java.util.Arrays: /** * Assigns the specified long value to each element of the specified * range of the specified array of longs. The range to be filled * extends from index <tt>fromIndex</tt>, inclusive, to index * <tt>toIndex</tt>, exclusive. (If <tt>fromIndex==toIndex</tt>, the * range to be filled is empty.) * * @param a the array to be filled * @param fromIndex the index of the first element (inclusive) to be * filled with the specified value * @param toIndex the index of the last element (exclusive) to be * filled with the specified value * @param val the value to be stored in all elements of the array * @throws IllegalArgumentException if <tt>fromIndex &gt; toIndex</tt> * @throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if <tt>fromIndex &lt; 0</tt> or * <tt>toIndex &gt; a.length</tt> */ public static void fill(long[] a, int fromIndex, int toIndex, long val) { rangeCheck(a.length, fromIndex, toIndex); for (int i=fromIndex; i<toIndex; i++) a[i] = val; } The above snippet appears in the source code 8 times, with very little variation in the documentation/method signature but exactly the same method body, one for each of the root array types int[], short[], char[], byte[], boolean[], double[], float[], and Object[]. I believe that unless one resorts to reflection (which is an entirely different subject in itself), this repetition is inevitable. I understand that as a utility class, such high concentration of repetitive Java code is highly atypical, but even with the best practice, repetition does happen! Refactoring doesn't always work because it's not always possible (the obvious case is when the repetition is in the documentation). Obviously maintaining this source code is a nightmare. A slight typo in the documentation, or a minor bug in the implementation, is multiplied by however many repetitions was made. In fact, the best example happens to involve this exact class: Google Research Blog - Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken (by Joshua Bloch, Software Engineer) The bug is a surprisingly subtle one, occurring in what many thought to be just a simple and straightforward algorithm. // int mid =(low + high) / 2; // the bug int mid = (low + high) >>> 1; // the fix The above line appears 11 times in the source code! So my questions are: How are these kinds of repetitive Java code/documentation handled in practice? How are they developed, maintained, and tested? Do you start with "the original", and make it as mature as possible, and then copy and paste as necessary and hope you didn't make a mistake? And if you did make a mistake in the original, then just fix it everywhere, unless you're comfortable with deleting the copies and repeating the whole replication process? And you apply this same process for the testing code as well? Would Java benefit from some sort of limited-use source code preprocessing for this kind of thing? Perhaps Sun has their own preprocessor to help write, maintain, document and test these kind of repetitive library code? A comment requested another example, so I pulled this one from Google Collections: com.google.common.base.Predicates lines 276-310 (AndPredicate) vs lines 312-346 (OrPredicate). The source for these two classes are identical, except for: AndPredicate vs OrPredicate (each appears 5 times in its class) "And(" vs Or(" (in the respective toString() methods) #and vs #or (in the @see Javadoc comments) true vs false (in apply; ! can be rewritten out of the expression) -1 /* all bits on */ vs 0 /* all bits off */ in hashCode() &= vs |= in hashCode()

  Read the article

• Multi-part question about multi-threading, locks and multi-core processors (multi ^ 3)

  - by MusiGenesis

  I have a program with two methods. The first method takes two arrays as parameters, and performs an operation in which values from one array are conditionally written into the other, like so: void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset) { for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++) { int rdr = dest[i + offset]; dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr; } } The second method creates two separate sets of int arrays and iterates through them such that each array of one set is Blended with each array from the other set, like so: void CrossBlend() { int[][] set1 = new int[150][75000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles int[][] set2 = new int[25][10000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles for (int i1 = 0; i1 < set1.Length; i1++) { for (int i2 = 0; i2 < set2.Length; i2++) { Blend(set1[i1], set2[i2], 0); // or any offset, doesn't matter } } } First question: Since this apporoach is an obvious candidate for parallelization, is it intrinsically thread-safe? It seems like no, since I can conceive a scenario (unlikely, I think) where one thread's changes are lost because a different threads ~simultaneous operation. If no, would this: void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset) { lock (dest) { for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++) { int rdr = dest[i + offset]; dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr; } } } be an effective fix? Second question: If so, what would be the likely performance cost of using locks like this? I assume that with something like this, if a thread attempts to lock a destination array that is currently locked by another thread, the first thread would block until the lock was released instead of continuing to process something. Also, how much time does it actually take to acquire a lock? Nanosecond scale, or worse than that? Would this be a major issue in something like this? Third question: How would I best approach this problem in a multi-threaded way that would take advantage of multi-core processors (and this is based on the potentially wrong assumption that a multi-threaded solution would not speed up this operation on a single core processor)? I'm guessing that I would want to have one thread running per core, but I don't know if that's true.

  Read the article

• Which third party website thumbnailing services do you use?

  - by Ben Delarre

  I've got a requirement for showing thumbnails of arbitrary websites. I need to be able to show small thumbnails (120px by 90px), and larger thumbnails of around 480px wide. I'll need to specify the queue and invalid placeholder images and preferably have a pingback when the queued images are processed so I can respond appropriately. I'd also need a simple API I can use either directly embedded in my HTML, or from a simple web request to queue the images. I've been looking at various services ranging from low-fi services, to large scale ones - here's some examples: www.bitpixels.com Uses Google AppEngine, seems like a prototype or a toy. Free! www.websnapr.com Tried using this, made a free account and requested a thumbnail. Waited a few minutes and refreshed a couple of times, and ended up having the account banned. Free is tricky yes, but if I can't try it out successfully I'm disinclined to pay. www.shrinktheweb.com Free account seems to be very quick. Lots of documentation on the site, and even covers local caching of the images to your own server (documentation mostly in PHP). Quality of thumbnails look good, and there appear to be sufficient options for setting thumbnail placeholder images and parameters for altering how the thumbnailing is done. Also supports large 'screenshots' of URLs - very useful for me. Discovered the PRO pricing is an à la carte menu, allowing me to select just the features I want and keep the monthly cost low. Excellent stuff, have decided to use this service. www.thumbalizr.com Good coverage of thumbnail sizes and control options - even allowing specification for browser width when thumbnailing. No ping-back, but I can live without that. Supports local caching of images with PHP API, would prefer .NET, but can port it if necessary. Looks like a fairly professional service but seems fairly expensive for the number of thumbnails you get to generate. apologies for lack of proper linking - spam protection! I'm not entirely convinced by any of them, and since this will be a long term service I'd like some stability and support. I'm willing to pay for the service, but I'd want something that fulfills most if not all of my requirements for that. I should also mention that we're hosted on Windows under IIS, so local solutions involving Xvfb and the like sadly can't be used for this project. So my question is: what services do you use? How have they panned out, are you happy with them?

  Read the article

• Cases of companies taking IP rights of your own personal projects developed outside company time

  - by GSS

  Hi, I have heard of cases where a developer working for a company is also making his own personal projects in his own time, using his own equipment yet the company he works for tries to claim ownership for the project. I really find this annoying, and bang out of order. It should also be illegal. I am in this position (work for a company and working on my own systems - from small class libraries used to practise what I learn in my exam revision to a large commercial-scale system). While I don't know if the company will try to take ownership, all I know is they say they do not want a conflict of interest. Fair enough, my system is developed in my own time using my own equipment. They also say that work time should be for work only, which it is. Funny thing that as work is so boring, easy and slow that I have plenty of free time, which I wish I could spend on something productive - said system. The problem is, my company does not take hiring technical talent seriously. This is my first job, I am a junior coder (but my status/position doesn't really reflect what I can do), but I am the only developer. Likewise with the guy who controls Windows Server. As the contract does not say anything about taking ownership, I would assume they would. They would try to milk my success (I've made a good impression so I am sure they would). How can this be allowed? Are there any examples of this happening to any fellow Stacker here? It really makes my blood boil. What I find funny is that my company hardly has the expertise and resources to even be able to successfully run a project of my size. What I do at work is an ASP.NET application consisting of five pages, and even then there are flaws in the project. If I told them that they would also have to take responsibility for flaws in the project, then they would think twice! It's exactly because of this I save the best code for myself and at work I write rubbish code full of code smells. The company don't really care about error handling, as long as the business functionality works (ie a scheduled email sends, but there is no error handling). They'd think twice when they see the embarassment and business cost of a YSOD...

  Read the article

• Web P2P video confrence solution

  - by dtroy

  I'm looking for the best possible solution which will allow me to incorporate live video/audio conference between 2 users(only 2 at this point) into a flash gaming platform. The video chat is not just an extra feature, it's the main one. I'm mainly looking at open source implementations or something I'll be able to implement myself, but will consider commercial products if they are exactly what I need. Here are a few things I've looked at, but so far, I didn't find any of them good enough: Flash player 10's P2P capabilities sound promising, but I am aware of the fact that Adobe has not release any information on the RTMFP protocol and that there is no commercial server which supports it at this point. Stream all the video/audio live through a flash server (not p2p), but from my personal experience you don't get a smooth conversation. I think TokBox uses this method Java applets are a possible solution too (to perform p2p), but I don't think it will be a nice and elegant solution to combine them in the game at this point (and requires the user to authorize them). BTW, I couldn't find any useful implementations. So, If you know of any, i'll look into them. Google Gmail Video Chat uses a custom (and proprietary) browser plug-in which does the p2p and streams the video/audio into the flash player. This is a possible solution, but I rather not implement the entire p2p protocol stack + browser plug-in at this stage and concentrate on other aspect of the game itself. I think they are using XMPP based protocol similar to Jingle and they've release a Jingle librarby but without the video confrencing implementation. EDIT: In response to Branden: I am aware of Adobe Stratus. Stratus is a beta, hosted rendezvous service that aids establishing communications between Flash Player endpoints (RTMFP server). This current release of the Stratus is prerelease and is designed for evaluation purposes only. The service is not final. There is no guarantee that the service will continue to exist in the future or any information about the future cost. That's why I don't think it can be used as a commercial solution. At least not yet. I'd appreciate your suggestions and advice. thanks!

  Read the article

• How do you attract programmers in rural areas?

  - by Reed Copsey

  I run a software development group for a very small, but stable and established company in a small town, somewhat outside of the "big city". Unfortunately, the "programmer" labor pool is much smaller due to the size of the city. There are many positives to working in this area, especially in terms of quality of life (particularly for people interested in outdoor activities), lower cost of living, great schools and neighborhoods, etc. However, I've always had difficulty attracting high-qualtiy, experienced developers. For those of you who hire developers outside of large cities: Where do you advertise to find good developers? Many of the large sites are very focused in certain metropolitan areas, and seem inappropriate places to advertise if you're outside of that main region. How do you attract quality developers to rural (or at least less metropolitan) locations? Do you find that you make more sacrifices in your hiring due to a smaller labor pool? Or do you just wait, and take extra time to attract people? What sacrifices do you expect to make if you are outside of the main developer-rich cities? For all of the developers out there... What would entice you to working in a smaller town? Are there things that would stand out and make you willing to relocate or at least apply to a position that was not nearby? What specific qualities would help you want to move outside of the city? In the past, I've had difficulty with finding good people. Most of the people who've applied and been willing to move out to a more rural location seem like the types that can't keep a quality job elsewhere. I'd like to know what advice people have to attracting quality technical staff. I don't believe its the work itself that's been the problem - The work is both interesting and challenging, and nearly 100% new development. The developers I have seem very happy with their situation - they love the work, the atmosphere, etc. It's more a matter of finding willing, able developers. Edit: More info after the first couple of answers: Right now, some of my best developers telecommute (some work from overseas); however, for this question, I'm trying to figure out how to get people who want to live and work full time locally. I need some people with whom I interact every day.

  Read the article

• Function-Local Static Const variable Initialization semantics.

  - by Hassan Syed

  The questions are in bold, for those that cannot be bothered reading a question in depth. This is a followup to this question. It is to do with the initialization semantics of static variables in functions. Static variables should be initialized once, and their internal state might be altered later - as I (currently) do in the linked question. However, the code in question does not require the feature to change the state of the variable later. Let me clarrify my position, since I don't require the string object's internal state to change. The code is for a trait class for meta programming, and as such would would benifit from a const char * const ptr -- thus Ideally a local cost static const variable is needed. My educated guess is that in this case the string in question will be optimally placed in memory by the link-loader, and that the code is more secure and maps to the intended semantics. This leads to the semantics of such a variable "The C++ Programming language Third Edition -- Stroustrup" does not have anything (that I could find) to say about this matter. All that is said is that the variable is initialized once when the flow of control of the thread first reaches the code. This leads me to ponder if the following code would be sensible, and if not what are the intended semantics ?. #include <iostream> const char * const GetString(const char * x_in) { static const char * const x = x_in; return x; } int main() { const char * const temp = GetString("yahoo"); std::cout << temp << std::endl; const char * const temp2 = GetString("yahoo2"); std::cout << temp2 << std::endl; } The following compiles on GCC and prints "yahoo" twice. Which is what I want -- However it might not be standards compliant (which is why I post this question). It might be more elegant to have two functions, "SetString" and "String" where the latter forwards to the first. If it is standards compliant does someone know of a templates implementation in boost (or elsewhere) ?

  Read the article

• What are the types and inner workings of a query optimizer?

  - by Frank Developer

  As I understand it, most query optimizers are cost-based. Some can be influenced by hints like FIRST_ROWS(). Others are tailored for OLAP. Is it possible to know more detailed logic about how Informix IDS and SE's optimizers decide what's the best route for processing a query, other than SET EXPLAIN? Is there any documentation which illustrates the ranking of SELECT statements? I would imagine that "SELECT col FROM table WHERE ROWID = n" ranks 1st. What are the rest of them?.. If I'm not mistaking, Informix's ROWID is a SERIAL(INT) which allows for a max. of 2GB nrows, or maybe it uses INT9 for TB's nrows?.. However, I think Oracle uses HEX values for ROWID. Too bad ROWID can't be oftenly used, since a rows ROWID can change. So maybe ROWID is used by the optimizer as a counter? Perhaps, it could be used for implementing the query progress idea I mentioned in my "Begin viewing query results before query completes" question? For some reason, I feel it wouldn't be that difficult to report a query's progress while being processed, perhaps at the expense of some slight overhead, but it would be nice to know ahead of time: A "Google-like" estimate of how many rows meet a query's criteria, display it's progress every 100, 200, 500 or 1,000 rows, give users the ability to cancel it at anytime and start displaying the qualifying rows as they are being put into the current list, while it continues searching?.. This is just one example, perhaps we could think other neat/useful features, the ingridients are more or less there. Perhaps we could fine-tune each query with more granularity than currently available? OLTP queries tend to be mostly static and pre-defined. The "what-if's" are more OLAP, so let's try to add more control and intelligence to it? So, therefore, being able to more precisely control, not "hint-influence" a query is what's needed and therefore it would be necessary to know how the optimizers logic is programmed. We can then have Dynamic SELECT and other statements for specific situations! Maybe even tell IDS to read blocks of indexes nodes at-a-time instead of one-by-one, etc. etc.

  Read the article

• Function Point Analysis -- a seriously over-estimating technique?

  - by kizzx2

  I know questions about FPA has been asked numerous times before, but this time I'm taking a more analytical angle at it, backed up with data. 1. First, some data This question is based on a tutorial. He had a "Sample Count" section where he demonstrated it step by step. You can see some screenshots of his sample application here. In the end, he calculated the unadjusted FP to be 99. There is another article on InformIT with industry data on typical hour/FP. It ranges from 2 hours/FP to 27.4 hours/FP. Let's try to stick with 2 for the moment (since SO readers are probably the more efficient crowd :p). 2. Reality check!? Now just check out the screenshots again. Do a little math here 99 * 2 = 198 hours 198 hours / 40 hours per week = 5 weeks Seriously? That sample application is going to take 5 weeks to implement? Is it just my feeling that it wouldn't take any decent programmer longer than one week to have it completed? Now let's try estimating the cost of the project. We'll use New York's minimum wage at the moment (Wikipedia), which is $7.25 198 * 7.25 = $1435.5 From what I could see from the screenshots, this application is a small excel-improvement app. I could have bought MS Office Pro for 200 bucks which gives me greater interoperability (.xls files) and flexibility (spreadsheets). (For the record, that same Web site has another article discussing productivity. It seems like they typically use 4.2 hours/FP, which gives us even more shocking stats: 99 * 4.2 = 415 hours = 10 weeks = almost 3 whopping months! 415 hours * $7.25 = $3000 zomg (That's even assuming that all our poor coders get the minimum wage!) 3. Am I missing something here? Right now, I could come up with several possible explanation: FPA is really only suited for bigger projects (1000+ FPs) so it becomes extremely inaccurate at smaller scale. The hours/FP metric fluctuates abruptly from team to team, project to project. For a small project like this, we could have used something like 0.5 hour/FP or something. (Now this kind of makes the whole estimation thing pointless, unless my firm does the same type of projects for several years with the same team, not really common.) From my experience with several software metrics, Function Point is really not a lightweight metric. If the hour/FP thing fluctuates so much, then what's the point, maybe I could have gone with User Story Points which is a lot faster to get and arguably almost as uncertain. What would be the FP experts' answers to this?

  Read the article

• Optimize date query for large child tables: GiST or GIN?

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Problem 72 child tables, each having a year index and a station index, are defined as follows: CREATE TABLE climate.measurement_12_013 ( -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: id bigint NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('climate.measurement_id_seq'::regclass), -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: station_id integer NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: taken date NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: amount numeric(8,2) NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: category_id smallint NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: flag character varying(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT ' '::character varying, CONSTRAINT measurement_12_013_category_id_check CHECK (category_id = 7), CONSTRAINT measurement_12_013_taken_check CHECK (date_part('month'::text, taken)::integer = 12) ) INHERITS (climate.measurement) CREATE INDEX measurement_12_013_s_idx ON climate.measurement_12_013 USING btree (station_id); CREATE INDEX measurement_12_013_y_idx ON climate.measurement_12_013 USING btree (date_part('year'::text, taken)); (Foreign key constraints to be added later.) The following query runs abysmally slow due to a full table scan: SELECT count(1) AS measurements, avg(m.amount) AS amount FROM climate.measurement m WHERE m.station_id IN ( SELECT s.id FROM climate.station s, climate.city c WHERE -- For one city ... -- c.id = 5182 AND -- Where stations are within an elevation range ... -- s.elevation BETWEEN 0 AND 3000 AND 6371.009 * SQRT( POW(RADIANS(c.latitude_decimal - s.latitude_decimal), 2) + (COS(RADIANS(c.latitude_decimal + s.latitude_decimal) / 2) * POW(RADIANS(c.longitude_decimal - s.longitude_decimal), 2)) ) <= 50 ) AND -- -- Begin extracting the data from the database. -- -- The data before 1900 is shaky; insufficient after 2009. -- extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) BETWEEN 1900 AND 2009 AND -- Whittled down by category ... -- m.category_id = 1 AND m.taken BETWEEN -- Start date. (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date AND -- End date. Calculated by checking to see if the end date wraps -- into the next year. If it does, then add 1 to the current year. -- (cast(extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) + greatest( -1 * sign( (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-12-31')::date - (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date ), 0 ) AS text)||'-12-31')::date GROUP BY extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) The sluggishness comes from this part of the query: m.taken BETWEEN /* Start date. */ (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date AND /* End date. Calculated by checking to see if the end date wraps into the next year. If it does, then add 1 to the current year. */ (cast(extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) + greatest( -1 * sign( (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-12-31')::date - (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date ), 0 ) AS text)||'-12-31')::date The HashAggregate from the plan shows a cost of 10006220141.11, which is, I suspect, on the astronomically huge side. There is a full table scan on the measurement table (itself having neither data nor indexes) being performed. The table aggregates 237 million rows from its child tables. Question What is the proper way to index the dates to avoid full table scans? Options I have considered: GIN GiST Rewrite the WHERE clause Separate year_taken, month_taken, and day_taken columns to the tables What are your thoughts? Thank you!

  Read the article

• When should I use indexed arrays of OpenGL vertices?

  - by Tartley

  I'm trying to get a clear idea of when I should be using indexed arrays of OpenGL vertices, drawn with gl[Multi]DrawElements and the like, versus when I should simply use contiguous arrays of vertices, drawn with gl[Multi]DrawArrays. (Update: The consensus in the replies I got is that one should always be using indexed vertices.) I have gone back and forth on this issue several times, so I'm going to outline my current understanding, in the hopes someone can either tell me I'm now finally more or less correct, or else point out where my remaining misunderstandings are. Specifically, I have three conclusions, in bold. Please correct them if they are wrong. One simple case is if my geometry consists of meshes to form curved surfaces. In this case, the vertices in the middle of the mesh will have identical attributes (position, normal, color, texture coord, etc) for every triangle which uses the vertex. This leads me to conclude that: 1. For geometry with few seams, indexed arrays are a big win. Follow rule 1 always, except: For geometry that is very 'blocky', in which every edge represents a seam, the benefit of indexed arrays is less obvious. To take a simple cube as an example, although each vertex is used in three different faces, we can't share vertices between them, because for a single vertex, the surface normals (and possible other things, like color and texture co-ord) will differ on each face. Hence we need to explicitly introduce redundant vertex positions into our array, so that the same position can be used several times with different normals, etc. This means that indexed arrays are of less use. e.g. When rendering a single face of a cube: 0 1 o---o |\ | | \ | | \| o---o 3 2 (this can be considered in isolation, because the seams between this face and all adjacent faces mean than none of these vertices can be shared between faces) if rendering using GL_TRIANGLE_FAN (or _STRIP), then each face of the cube can be rendered thus: verts = [v0, v1, v2, v3] colors = [c0, c0, c0, c0] normal = [n0, n0, n0, n0] Adding indices does not allow us to simplify this. From this I conclude that: 2. When rendering geometry which is all seams or mostly seams, when using GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP or _FAN, then I should never use indexed arrays, and should instead always use gl[Multi]DrawArrays. (Update: Replies indicate that this conclusion is wrong. Even though indices don't allow us to reduce the size of the arrays here, they should still be used because of other performance benefits, as discussed in the comments) The only exception to rule 2 is: When using GL_TRIANGLES (instead of strips or fans), then half of the vertices can still be re-used twice, with identical normals and colors, etc, because each cube face is rendered as two separate triangles. Again, for the same single cube face: 0 1 o---o |\ | | \ | | \| o---o 3 2 Without indices, using GL_TRIANGLES, the arrays would be something like: verts = [v0, v1, v2, v2, v3, v0] normals = [n0, n0, n0, n0, n0, n0] colors = [c0, c0, c0, c0, c0, c0] Since a vertex and a normal are often 3 floats each, and a color is often 3 bytes, that gives, for each cube face, about: verts = 6 * 3 floats = 18 floats normals = 6 * 3 floats = 18 floats colors = 6 * 3 bytes = 18 bytes = 36 floats and 18 bytes per cube face. (I understand the number of bytes might change if different types are used, the exact figures are just for illustration.) With indices, we can simplify this a little, giving: verts = [v0, v1, v2, v3] (4 * 3 = 12 floats) normals = [n0, n0, n0, n0] (4 * 3 = 12 floats) colors = [c0, c0, c0, c0] (4 * 3 = 12 bytes) indices = [0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 0] (6 shorts) = 24 floats + 12 bytes, and maybe 6 shorts, per cube face. See how in the latter case, vertices 0 and 2 are used twice, but only represented once in each of the verts, normals and colors arrays. This sounds like a small win for using indices, even in the extreme case of every single geometry edge being a seam. This leads me to conclude that: 3. When using GL_TRIANGLES, one should always use indexed arrays, even for geometry which is all seams. Please correct my conclusions in bold if they are wrong.

  Read the article

• Closure Tables - Is this enough data to display a tree view?

  - by James Pitt

  Here is the table I have created by testing the closure table method. | id | parentId | childId | hops | | | | | 270 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 271 | 7 | 7 | 0 | 272 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 273 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 276 | 10 | 10 | 0 | 281 | 9 | 10 | 1 | 282 | 7 | 9 | 1 | 283 | 7 | 10 | 2 | 285 | 7 | 8 | 1 | 286 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 287 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 288 | 6 | 10 | 3 | 289 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 293 | 6 | 9 | 1 | 294 | 6 | 10 | 2 I am trying to create a simple tree of this using PHP. There does not seem to be enough data to create the table. For example, when I look purely at parentId = 6: -Part 6 -Part 7 - ? - ? -Part 9 - ? - ? We know that parts 8 and 10 exists below Part 7 or 9, but not which. We know that part 10 exists at both 3 and 4 nodes deep but where? If I look at other data in the table it is possible to tell it should be: - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 9 - Part 10 I thought one of the benefits of closure tables was there was no need for recursive queries? Could you help explain what I am doing wrong? EDIT: For clarification, this is a mapping table. There is another table called "parts" which has a column called part_id that correlates to both the parentId and childId columns in the "closure" table. The "id" column in the table above (closure) is just for the purposes of maintaining a primary key. It is not really necessary. The methods I have used to create this closure table is described in the following article: http://dirtsimple.org/2010/11/simplest-way-to-do-tree-based-queries.html EDIT2: It can have two and three hops. I will explain easier by assigning names to the items. Part 6 = Bicycle Part 7 = Gears Part 8 = Chain Part 9 = Bolt Part 10 = Nut Nut is part of Bolt. The Bolt and Nut combo exists directly within Bicycle and within Gears which is part of Bicycle. In relation to what method to use I have looked at Adjacency, Edges, Enum Paths, Closures, DAGS(networks) and the Nested Set Model. I am still trying to work out what is what, but this is an extremely complex component database where there are multiple parents and any modification to a sub-tree must propogate through the other trees. More importantly there will be insertions, deletions and tree views that I wish to avoid recursion during general use, even at the cost of database space and query time during entry.

  Read the article

• Function Point Analysis -- a seriously overestimating technique?

  - by kizzx2

  I know questions about FPA has been asked numerous times before, but this time I'm taking a more analytical angle at it, backed up with data. 1. First, some data This question is based on a tutorial. He had a "Sample Count" section where he demonstrated it step by step. You can see some screenshots of his sample application here. In the end, he calculated the unadjusted FP to be 99. There is another article on InformIT with industry data on typical hour/FP. It ranges from 2 hours/FP to 27.4 hours/FP. Let's try to stick with 2 for the moment (since SO readers are probably the more efficient crowd :p). 2. Reality check!? Now just check out the screenshots again. Do a little math here 99 * 2 = 198 hours 198 hours / 40 hours per week = 5 weeks Seriously? That sample application is going to take 5 weeks to implement? Is it just my feeling that it wouldn't take any decent programmer longer than one week (I"m not even saying weekend) to have it completed? Now let's try estimating the cost of the project. We'll use New York's minimum wage at the moment (Wikipedia), which is $7.25 198 * 7.25 = $1435.5 From what I could see from the screenshots, this application is a small excel-improvement app. I could have bought MS Office Pro for 200 bucks which gives me greater interoperability (.xls files) and flexibility (spreadsheets). (For the record, that same Web site has another article discussing productivity. It seems like they typically use 4.2 hours/FP, which gives us even more shocking stats: 99 * 4.2 = 415 hours = 10 weeks = almost 3 whopping months! 415 hours * $7.25 = $3000 zomg (That's even assuming that all our poor coders get the minimum wage!) 3. Am I missing something here? Right now, I could come up with several possible explanation: FPA is really only suited for bigger projects (1000+ FPs) so it becomes extremely inaccurate at smaller scale. The hours/FP metric fluctuates abruptly from team to team, project to project. For a small project like this, we could have used something like 0.5 hour/FP or something. (Now this kind of makes the whole estimation thing pointless, unless my firm does the same type of projects for several years with the same team, not really common.) From my experience with several software metrics, Function Point is really not a lightweight metric. If the hour/FP thing fluctuates so much, then what's the point, maybe I could have gone with User Story Points which is a lot faster to get and arguably almost as uncertain. What would be the FP experts' answers to this?

  Read the article

• Using pointers, references, handles to generic datatypes, as generic and flexible as possible

  - by Patrick

  In my application I have lots of different data types, e.g. Car, Bicycle, Person, ... (they're actually other data types, but this is just for the example). Since I also have quite some 'generic' code in my application, and the application was originally written in C, pointers to Car, Bicycle, Person, ... are often passed as void-pointers to these generic modules, together with an identification of the type, like this: Car myCar; ShowNiceDialog ((void *)&myCar, DATATYPE_CAR); The 'ShowNiceDialog' method now uses meta-information (functions that map DATATYPE_CAR to interfaces to get the actual data out of Car) to get information of the car, based on the given data type. That way, the generic logic only has to be written once, and not every time again for every new data type. Of course, in C++ you could make this much easier by using a common root class, like this class RootClass { public: string getName() const = 0; }; class Car : public RootClass { ... }; void ShowNiceDialog (RootClass *root); The problem is that in some cases, we don't want to store the data type in a class, but in a totally different format to save memory. In some cases we have hundreds of millions of instances that we need to manage in the application, and we don't want to make a full class for every instance. Suppose we have a data type with 2 characteristics: A quantity (double, 8 bytes) A boolean (1 byte) Although we only need 9 bytes to store this information, putting it in a class means that we need at least 16 bytes (because of the padding), and with the v-pointer we possibly even need 24 bytes. For hundreds of millions of instances, every byte counts (I have a 64-bit variant of the application and in some cases it needs 6 GB of memory). The void-pointer approach has the advantage that we can almost encode anything in a void-pointer and decide how to use it if we want information from it (use it as a real pointer, as an index, ...), but at the cost of type-safety. Templated solutions don't help since the generic logic forms quite a big part of the application, and we don't want to templatize all this. Additionally, the data model can be extended at run time, which also means that templates won't help. Are there better (and type-safer) ways to handle this than a void-pointer? Any references to frameworks, whitepapers, research material regarding this?

  Read the article

• Using empty row as default in a ComboBox with Style "DropDownList"?

  - by Pesche Helfer

  Hi board I am trying to write a method, that takes a ComboBox, a DataTable and a TextBox as arguments. The purpose of it is to filter the members displayed in the ComboBox according to the TextBox.Text. The DataTable contains the entire list of possible entries that will then be filtered. For filtering, I create a DataView of the DataTable, add a RowFilter and then bind this View to the ComboBox as DataSource. To prevent the user from typing into the ComboBox, I choose the DropDownStyle DropDownList. That’s working fine so far, except that the user should also be able to choose nothing / empty line. In fact, this should be the default member to be displayed (to prevent choosing a wrong member by accident, if the user clicks through the dialog too fast). I tried to solve this problem by adding a new Row to the view. While this works for some cases, the main issue here is that any DataTable can be passed to the method. If the DataTable contains columns that cannot be null and don’t contain a default value, I suppose I will raise an error by adding an empty row. A possibility would be to create a view that contains only the column that is defined as DisplayMember, and the one that is defined as ValueMember. Alas, this can’t be done with a view in C#. I would like to avoid creating a true copy of the DataTable at all cost, since who knows how big it will get with time. Do you have any suggestions how to get around this problem? Instead of a view, could I create an object containing two members and assign the DisplayMember and the ValueMember to these members? Would the members be passed as reference (what I hope) or would true copied be created (in which case it would not be a solution)? Thank you very much for your help! Best regards public static void ComboFilter(ComboBox cb, DataTable dtSource, TextBox filterTextBox) { cb.DropDownStyle = ComboBoxStyle.DropDownList; string displayMember = cb.DisplayMember; DataView filterView = new DataView(dtSource); filterView.AddNew(); filterView.RowFilter = displayMember + " LIKE '%" + filterTextBox.Text + "%'"; cb.DataSource = filterView; }

  Read the article

• How can I create the XML::Simple data structure using a Perl XML SAX parser?

  - by DVK

  Summary: I am looking a fast XML parser (most likely a wrapper around some standard SAX parser) which will produce per-record data structure 100% identical to those produced by XML::Simple. Details: We have a large code infrastructure which depends on processing records one-by-one and expects the record to be a data structure in a format produced by XML::Simple since it always used XML::Simple since early Jurassic era. An example simple XML is: <root> <rec><f1>v1</f1><f2>v2</f2></rec> <rec><f1>v1b</f1><f2>v2b</f2></rec> <rec><f1>v1c</f1><f2>v2c</f2></rec> </root> And example rough code is: sub process_record { my ($obj, $record_hash) = @_; # do_stuff } my $records = XML::Simple->XMLin(@args)->{root}; foreach my $record (@$records) { $obj->process_record($record) }; As everyone knows XML::Simple is, well, simple. And more importantly, it is very slow and a memory hog—due to being a DOM parser and needing to build/store 100% of data in memory. So, it's not the best tool for parsing an XML file consisting of large amount of small records record-by-record. However, re-writing the entire code (which consist of large amount of "process_record"-like methods) to work with standard SAX parser seems like an big task not worth the resources, even at the cost of living with XML::Simple. I'm looking for an existing module which will probably be based on a SAX parser (or anything fast with small memory footprint) which can be used to produce $record hashrefs one by one based on the XML pictured above that can be passed to $obj->process_record($record) and be 100% identical to what XML::Simple's hashrefs would have been. I don't care much what the interface of the new module is; e.g whether I need to call next_record() or give it a callback coderef accepting a record.

  Read the article

• Can this way of storing typed objects be improved?

  - by Pindatjuh

  This is an "can it be improved"-question. Topic: Storing typed objects in memory. Background information: I'm building a compiler for the x86-32 Windows platform for my language. My goal includes typed objects. Idea: Every primitive is a semi-class (it can be used as if it was a normal class, but it's stored more compact). Every class is represented by primitives and some meta-data (containing class-properties, inheritance stuff, etc.). The meta-data is complex: it doesn't use fields but instead context-switches. For primitives, the meta-data is very small, compared to a "real" class, which is alot bigger. This enables another idea that "primitives are objects", in my language, which I found nessecairy. Example: If I have an array of 32 booleans, then the pure content of this array is exactly 4 byte (32 bits of booleans). The meta-data will contain flags that the type is an array of booleans, which contains 32 entries. The meta-data is very compacted, on bit-level: using a sort of "packing" mechanism, which is read by a FSM at runtime, when doing inspection of the type (like when passing the object to methods for checking, etc.) For instance (read from left to right, top to bottom, remember vertical position when going to the right, and check nearest column header for meaning of switch): Primitive? Array? Type-Meta 1 Byte? || Size (1 byte) 1 1 [...] 1 [...] done 0 2 Bytes? || Size (2 bytes) 1 [...] done || Size (4 bytes) 0 [...] done Integer? 1 Byte? 2 Bytes? 0 1 0 1 done 1 done 0 done Boolean? Byte? 0 1 0 done 1 done More-Primitives 0 .... Class-Stuff (Huge) 0 ... (After reaching done the data is inserted. || = byte alignment. [...] is variable sized. ... is not described here, for simplicity. And let's call them cost-based-data-structures.) For an array of 32 booleans containing all true values, the memory for this type would be (read top-down): 1 Primitive 1 Array 1 ArrayType: Primitive 0 Not-Array 0 Not-Integer 1 Boolean 0 Not-Byte (thus bit) 1 Integer Size: 1 Byte 00100000 Array size 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 Data (user defined) Thus, 8 bytes represent 32 booleans in an array: 11100101 00100000 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 How can I improve this? (Both performance- and memory-consumption wise)

  Read the article

• When to call glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB)?

  - by Steven Lu

  I have a rendering system where I draw to an FBO with a multisampled renderbuffer, then blit it to another FBO with a texture in order to resolve the samples in order to read off the texture to perform post-processing shading while drawing to the backbuffer (FBO index 0). Now I'd like to get some correct sRGB output... The problem is the behavior of the program is rather inconsistent between when I run it on OS X and Windows and this also changes depending on the machine: On Windows with the Intel HD 3000 it will not apply the sRGB nonlinearity but on my other machine with a Nvidia GTX 670 it does. On the Intel HD 3000 in OS X it will also apply it. So this probably means that I'm not setting my GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB enable state at the right points in the program. However I can't seem to find any tutorials that actually tell me when I ought to enable it, they only ever mention that it's dead easy and comes at no performance cost. I am currently not loading in any textures so I haven't had a need to deal with linearizing their colors yet. To force the program to not simply spit back out the linear color values, what I have tried is simply comment out my glDisable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) line, which effectively means this setting is enabled for the entire pipeline, and I actually redundantly force it back on every frame. I don't know if this is correct or not. It certainly does apply a nonlinearization to the colors but I can't tell if this is getting applied twice (which would be bad). It could apply the gamma as I render to my first FBO. It could do it when I blit the first FBO to the second FBO. Why not? I've gone so far as to take screen shots of my final frame and compare raw pixel color values to the colors I set them to in the program: I set the input color to RGB(1,2,3) and the output is RGB(13,22,28). That seems like quite a lot of color compression at the low end and leads me to question if the gamma is getting applied multiple times. I have just now gone through the sRGB equation and I can verify that the conversion seems to be only applied once as linear 1/255, 2/255, and 3/255 do indeed map to sRGB 13/255, 22/255, and 28/255 using the equation 1.055*C^(1/2.4)+0.055. Given that the expansion is so large for these low color values it really should be obvious if the sRGB color transform is getting applied more than once. So, I still haven't determined what the right thing to do is. does glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) only apply to the final framebuffer values, in which case I can just set this during my GL init routine and forget about it hereafter?

  Read the article

• How best to modernize the 2002-era J2EE app?

  - by user331465

  I have this friend.... I have this friend who works on a java ee application (j2ee) application started in the early 2000's. Currently they add a feature here and there, but have a large codebase. Over the years the team has shrunk by 70%. [Yes, the "i have this friend is". It's me, attempting to humorously inject teenage high-school counselor shame into the mix] Java, Vintage 2002 The application uses EJB 2.1, struts 1.x, DAO's etc with straight jdbc calls (mixture of stored procedures and prepared statements). No ORM. For caching they use a mixture of OpenSymphony OSCache and a home-grown cache layer. Over the last few years, they have spent effort to modernize the UI using ajax techniques and libraries. This largely involves javascript libaries (jquery, yui, etc). Client Side On the client side, the lack of upgrade path from struts1 to struts2 discouraged them from migrating to struts2. Other web frameworks became popular (wicket, spring , jsf). Struts2 was not the "clear winner". Migrating all the existing UI from Struts1 to Struts2/wicket/etc did not seem to present much marginal benefit at a very high cost. They did not want to have a patchwork of technologies-du-jour (subsystem X in Struts2, subsystem Y in Wicket, etc.) so developer write new features using Struts 1. Server Side On the server side, they looked into moving to ejb 3, but never had a big impetus. The developers are all comfortable with ejb-jar.xml, EJBHome, EJBRemote, that "ejb 2.1 as is" represented the path of least resistance. One big complaint about the ejb environment: programmers still pretend "ejb server runs in separate jvm than servlet engine". No app server (jboss/weblogic) has ever enforced this separation. The team has never deployed the ejb server on a separate box then the app server. The ear file contains multiple copies of the same jar file; one for the 'web layer' (foo.war/WEB-INF/lib) and one for the server side (foo.ear/). The app server only loads one jar. The duplications makes for ambiguity. Caching As for caching, they use several cache implementations: OpenSymphony cache and a homegrown cache. Jgroups provides clustering support Now What? The question: The team currently has spare cycles to to invest in modernizing the application? Where would the smart investor spend them? The main criteria: 1) productivity gains. Specifically reducing the time to develope new subsystems features and reduced maintenance. 2) performance/scalability. They do not care about fashion or techno-du-jour street cred. What do you all recommend? On the persistence side Switch everything (or new development only) to JPA/JPA2? Straight hibernate? Wait for Java EE 6? On the client/web-framework side: Migrate (some or all) to struts2? wicket? jsf/jsf2? As for caching: terracotta? ehcache? coherence? stick with what they have? how best to take advantage of the huge heap sizes that the 64-bit jvms offer? Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• shipping and handling fee calculation

  - by Newb

  Here is the question: Many companies normally charge a shipping and handling fee for purchases. Create a Web page that allows a user to enter a purchase price into a text box - include a JavaScript function that calculates shipping and handling. Add functionality to the script that adds a minimum shipping and handling fee of $1.50 for any purchase that is less than or equal to $25.00. For any orders over $25.00, add 10% to the total purchase price for shipping and handling, but do not include the $1.50 minimum shipping and handling fee. After you determine the total cost of the order (purchase plus shipping and handling), display it in an alert dialog box. I am beginner at JavaScript and struggling to get my code to work. It does display an alert box with the value entered by the user but doesn't add anything. Although, I don't know why the formula doesn't work. Please help. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Calculating Shipping & Handling</title> <script type="text/javascript"> /* <![CDATA[ */ var price=[]; var shipping=[]; var total=price+shipping; function calculateShipping(){ if (price <= 25){ shipping = (price + 1.5); } else { shipping = (price * 10 / 100); } window.alert("The purchase price with shipping is " + document.calculate.ent.value); } /* ]]> */ </script> </head> <body> <form name ="calculate" action="" > <p>Enter Purchase Price</p> <input type="text" name="ent" > <input type="button" name="button" value="Submit" onClick="calculateShipping()" /> </form> </body> </html>

  Read the article

• Recommended ASP.NET Shared Hosting

  - by coffeeaddict

  Ok, I have to admit I'm getting fed up with www.discountasp.net's pricing model and this annoyance has built up over the past 8 years or so. I've been with them for years and absolutely love them on the technical side, however it's getting ridiculously expensive for so little that you get. I mean here's my scenario: 1) I am running 2 SQL Server databases which costs me $10/ea per month so that's $20/month for 2 and I only get 500 mb disk space which is horrible 2) I am paying $10/mo just for the hosting itself which I only get 1 gig of disk space! I mean common! 3) I am simply running 2 small apps (Screwturn Wiki & Subtext Blog)...so I don't really care if it's up 99% or not, it's not worth paying a total of $300 just to keep these 2 apps running over discountasp.net Anyone else feel the same? Yes, I know they have great support, probably have great servers running behind this but in the end I really don't care as long as my site is up 95% or better. Yes, the hosting toolset rocks. But you know I bet you I can find a similar set somewhere else. I like how I can totally control IIS 7 at discountasp and I can control my own app pool etc. That's very powerful and essential. But anyone have any good alternatives to discountasp that gives me close to the same at a much more reasonable cost point? I mean http://www.m6.net/prices.aspx gives you 10 SQL Databases for $7 and 200 gigs disk space! I don't know about their tools or support but just looking at those numbers and some other hosts I've seen, I feel that discountasp.net is way out of line. They don't even offer any purchasing discounts such as it would be nice if my 2nd SQL Server is only $5/month not $10...stuff like this, to make it much more realistic and fair. Opinions (people who do have discountasp.net, people who have left them, or people who have another host they like)??? But geez $300 just to host a couple DBs and lightweight open source apps? Not worth the price they are charging. I'm almost at a price point that enables me to get a decent dedicated server! I really don't care about beta support. Not a big deal to me.

  Read the article

• Commitment to Zend Framework - any arguments against?

  - by Pekka

  I am refurbishing a big CMS that I have been working on for quite a number of years now. The product itself is great, but some components, the Database and translation classes for example, need urgent replacing - partly self-made as far back as 2002, grown into a bit of a chaos over time, and might have trouble surviving a security audit. So, I've been looking closely at a number of frameworks (or, more exactly, component Libraries, as I do not intend to change the basic structure of the CMS) and ended up with liking Zend Framework the best. They offer a solid MVC model but don't force you into it, and they offer a lot of professional components that have obviously received a lot of attention (Did you know there are multiple plurals in Russian, and you can't translate them using a simple ($number == 0) or ($number > 1) switch? I didn't, but Zend_Translate can handle it. Just to illustrate the level of thorougness the library seems to have been built with.) I am now literally at the point of no return, starting to replace key components of the system by the Zend-made ones. I'm not really having second thoughts - and I am surely not looking to incite a flame war - but before going onward, I would like to step back for a moment and look whether there is anything speaking against tying a big system closely to Zend Framework. What I like about Zend: As far as I can see, very high quality code Extremely well documented, at least regarding introductions to how things work (Haven't had to use detailed API documentation yet) Backed by a company that has an interest in seeing the framework prosper Well received in the community, has a considerable user base Employs coding standards I like Comes with a full set of unit tests Feels to me like the right choice to make - or at least, one of the right choices - in terms of modern, professional PHP development. I have been thinking about encapsulating and abstracting ZF's functionality into own classes to be able to switch frameworks more easily, but have come to the conclusion that this would not be a good idea because: it would be an unnecessary level of abstraction it could cost performance the big advantage of using a framework - the existence of a developer base that is familiar with its components - would partly be cancelled out therefore, the commitment to ZF would be a deep one. Thus my question: Is there anything substantial speaking against committing to the Zend Framework? Do you have insider knowledge of plans of Zend Inc.'s to go evil in 2011, and make it a closed source library? Is Zend Inc. run by vampires? Are there conceptual flaws in the code base you start to notice when you've transitioned all your projects to it? Is the appearance of quality code an illusion? Does the code look good, but run terribly slow on anything below my quad-core workstation?

  Read the article

• Need some help synch'ing outer loop counter with dialog.onconfirm()

  - by Chris Barnhill

  I am writing a game for Facebook. IN the following code, I have a problem. I have a for loop executing, and in that loop, I call a dialog and implement 'onconfirm' for the dialog. The problem is that I need to access th e loop counter inside of the onconfirm function. But because the onconfirm is called outside of the scope of the for loop, the counter value is no longer valid because it's been incremented. I need some way to pass the counter value to the dialog onconfirm as it was at the time the dialog was displayed, not after the loop has finished. Or maybe someone has a better solution. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. function unloadCargo() { //debugger; var actionPrompt = document.getElementById('action-prompt'); actionPrompt.setTextValue('Unloading cargo...'); var ajax = new Ajax(); ajax.responseType = Ajax.JSON; ajax.ondone = function(data) { debugger; if(data.unloadableCargo.length == 0) { loadCargo(); } else { //console.log('unloadable cargo='+dump(data.unloadableCargo)); var i = 0; var j = 0; var ucCount = data.unloadableCargo.length; for(i = 0; i < ucCount; i++) { cargoDialog = new Dialog(); cargoDialog.showChoice('Unload Cargo', 'Unload ' + data.unloadableCargo[i].goods_name + ' at ' + data.unloadableCargo[i].city_name + ' for ' + data.unloadableCargo[i].payoff + 'M euros?'); cargoDialog.onconfirm = function() { //console.log('unloadable cargo onconfirm='+dump(data.unloadableCargo)); var ajax = new Ajax(); var param = {"city_id": data.unloadableCargo[i].city_id, "goods_id": data.unloadableCargo[i].goods_id, "payoff": data.unloadableCargo[i].payoff}; ajax.ondone = function(demandData) { var demands = document.getElementById('demands'); var innerXhtml = '<span>'; for(var j = 0; j < demandData.demands.length; j++) { innerXhtml = innerXhtml + ' <div class="demand-item"><div class="demand-city">' + demandData.demands[j].city + '</div><div class="demand-pay">' + demandData.demands[j].cost + '</div><div class="demand-goods">' + demandData.demands[j].goods + '</div></div>'; } innerXtml = innerXhtml + ' </span>'; demands.setInnerXHTML(innerXhtml); // update balance loadCargo(); } ajax.post(baseURL + "/turn/do-unload-cargo", param); } cargoDialog.oncancel = function() { loadCargo(); } } //loadCargo(); } } ajax.post(baseURL + '/turn/unload-cargo'); }

  Read the article

• Unit Testing - Am I doing it right?

  - by baron

  Hi everyone, Basically I have been programing for a little while and after finishing my last project can fully understand how much easier it would have been if I'd have done TDD. I guess I'm still not doing it strictly as I am still writing code then writing a test for it, I don't quite get how the test becomes before the code if you don't know what structures and how your storing data etc... but anyway... Kind of hard to explain but basically lets say for example I have a Fruit objects with properties like id, color and cost. (All stored in textfile ignore completely any database logic etc) FruitID FruitName FruitColor FruitCost 1 Apple Red 1.2 2 Apple Green 1.4 3 Apple HalfHalf 1.5 This is all just for example. But lets say I have this is a collection of Fruit (it's a List<Fruit>) objects in this structure. And my logic will say to reorder the fruitids in the collection if a fruit is deleted (this is just how the solution needs to be). E.g. if 1 is deleted, object 2 takes fruit id 1, object 3 takes fruit id2. Now I want to test the code ive written which does the reordering, etc. How can I set this up to do the test? Here is where I've got so far. Basically I have fruitManager class with all the methods, like deletefruit, etc. It has the list usually but Ive changed hte method to test it so that it accepts a list, and the info on the fruit to delete, then returns the list. Unit-testing wise: Am I basically doing this the right way, or have I got the wrong idea? and then I test deleting different valued objects / datasets to ensure method is working properly. [Test] public void DeleteFruit() { var fruitList = CreateFruitList(); var fm = new FruitManager(); var resultList = fm.DeleteFruitTest("Apple", 2, fruitList); //Assert that fruitobject with x properties is not in list ? how } private static List<Fruit> CreateFruitList() { //Build test data var f01 = new Fruit {Name = "Apple",Id = 1, etc...}; var f02 = new Fruit {Name = "Apple",Id = 2, etc...}; var f03 = new Fruit {Name = "Apple",Id = 3, etc...}; var fruitList = new List<Fruit> {f01, f02, f03}; return fruitList; }

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203  | Next Page >