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• How to keep a big and complex software product maintainable over the years?

  - by chrmue

  I have been working as a software developer for many years now. It has been my experience that projects get more complex and unmaintainable as more developers get involved in the development of the product. It seems that software at a certain stage of development has the tendency to get "hackier" and "hackier" especially when none of the team members that defined the architecture work at the company any more. I find it frustrating that a developer who has to change something has a hard time getting the big picture of the architecture. Therefore, there is a tendency to fix problems or make changes in a way that works against the original architecture. The result is code that gets more and more complex and even harder to understand. Is there any helpful advice on how to keep source code really maintainable over the years?

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• Query something and return the reason if nothing has been found

  - by Daniel Hilgarth

  Assume I have a Query - as in CQS that is supposed to return a single value. Let's assume that the case that no value is found is not exceptional, so no exception will be thrown in this case. Instead, null is returned. However, if no value has been found, I need to act according to the reason why no value has been found. Assuming that the Query knows the reason, how would I communicate it to the caller of the Query? A simple solution would be not return the value directly but a container object that contains the value and the reason: public class QueryResult { public TValue Value { get; private set; } public TReason ReasonForNoValue { get; private set; } } But that feels clumsy, because if a value is found, ReasonForNoValue makes no sense and if no value has been found, Value makes no sense. What other options do I have to communicate the reason? What do you think of one event per reason? For reference: This is going to be implemented in C#.

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• Code Line Delimiter [closed]

  - by John Isaiah Carmona

  Possible Duplicate: Why are statements in many programming languages terminated by semicolons? I just found out that R Programming Language, which is somewhat belong to the C family (I'm not sure about this but it uses {} instead of begin end), uses a new line as a delimiter for a new line of code instead of the semi-colon ;. Why is some programming language designed to use a new line instead of a symbol like semi-colon which I think will make the code more readable? Phyton total = item_one + \ item_two + \ item_three C total = item_one + item_two + item_three;

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• Dependency Injection Confusion

  - by James

  I think I have a decent grasp of what Dependency Inversion principle (DIP) is, my confusion is more around dependency injection. My understanding is the whole point of DI is to decouple parts of an application, to allow changes in one part without effecting another, assuming the interface does not change. For examples sake, we have this public class MyClass(IMyInterface interface) { public MyClass { interface.DoSomething(); } } public interface IMyInterface { void DoSomething(); } How is this var iocContainer = new UnityContainer(); iocContainer.Resolve<MyClass>(); better practice than doing this //if multiple implementations are possible, could use a factory here. IMyInterface interface = new InterfaceImplementation(); var myClass = new MyClass(interface); It may be I am missing a very important point, but I am failing to see what is gained. I am aware that using an IOC container I can easily handle an objects life cycle, which is a +1 but I don't think that is core to what IOC is about.

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• Expiring timed actions a good idea?

  - by Bart van Heukelom

  We have an online game where players sometimes have to wait a while (say 30 minutes) before a process they intiated completes. This encourages them to come back later. An example of this is growing crops in Farmville or basically any action in the Sims Play4Free. Now, however, there is the idea to let these processes expire, so if the player doesn't 'reap' them in time (e.g. within 4 hours) they are aborted. I'm a bit sceptical about this. How will this make players come back more often? Is not the reward of reaping the process enough for that? Can we expect players to fit their daily schedule around our game, maybe even set the alarm clock at night? Won't this just cause players to give up on starting these processes in the first place? I realise this may be too subjective for this site, so I'll end with a concrete question: Do (m)any other online free-to-play games employ this technique?

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• Should I close database connections after use in PHP?

  - by Sprottenwels

  I wonder if I should close any unnecessary database connection inside of my PHP scripts. I am aware of the fact that database connections are closed implicitly when the block stops executing and 'manually' closing the connections could kinda bloat the codebase with unnecessary code. But shouldn't I do so in order to make by code as readable and as easy understandable as possible, while also preventing several possible issues during run time? Also, if I would do, would it be enough to unset() my database object?

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• Feature Driven Development in the work place?

  - by FXquincy

  Question Please explain Feature Driven Development in a nutshell? Situation My Business Analyst calls their documentation FDD, but it just seems overwhelmed by details. In a Nutshell An 'in a nutshell' example would be good, since I'm trying to reduce unnecessary detail and confusion. I want to add clarity, and an Occam's' razor approach to the documentation. Thanks for your help, Here's what I found

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• Best Option for Creating A Small Church Website

  - by Jim

  I've been asked to create a website for a small church. Their prior site was hosted on geocities which is no longer. They are not looking for anything robust, just an informational site with a calendar and maybe a contact form. The church would also like to be able to administer the site with little technical know-how. Cost is also an issue. Given these requirements, something like sites.google.com seems like a good option. However, my main concern is that Sites will suffer the same fate as geocities. It is definitely not a flagship Google product. Are there other good alternatives that fit the requirements?

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• Preferred lambda syntax?

  - by Roger Alsing

  I'm playing around a bit with my own C like DSL grammar and would like some oppinions. I've reserved the use of "(...)" for invocations. eg: foo(1,2); My grammar supports "trailing closures" , pretty much like Ruby's blocks that can be passed as the last argument of an invocation. Currently my grammar support trailing closures like this: foo(1,2) { //parameterless closure passed as the last argument to foo } or foo(1,2) [x] { //closure with one argument (x) passed as the last argument to foo print (x); } The reason why I use [args] instead of (args) is that (args) is ambigious: foo(1,2) (x) { } There is no way in this case to tell if foo expects 3 arguments (int,int,closure(x)) or if foo expects 2 arguments and returns a closure with one argument(int,int) - closure(x) So thats pretty much the reason why I use [] as for now. I could change this to something like: foo(1,2) : (x) { } or foo(1,2) (x) -> { } So the actual question is, what do you think looks best? [...] is somewhat wrist unfriendly. let x = [a,b] { } Ideas?

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• How is determined an impact of a requirement change on the existing code?

  - by MainMa

  Hi, How companies working on large projects evaluate an impact of a single modification on an existing code? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finished". A new requirement adds a new state, between 2nd and 3rd one. It means that: A constraint on the values 1 - 5 in the database must be changed, Business layer and code contracts must be changed to add a new state, Data access layer must be changed to take in account that, for example the state StateReady is now 6 instead of 5, etc. The application must implement a new state visually, add new controls for it, new localized strings for tool-tips, etc. When an application is written recently by one developer, it's more or less easy to predict every change to do. On the other hand, when an application was written for years by many people, no single person can anticipate every change immediately, without any investigation. So since this situation (such changes in requirements) is very frequent, I imagine there are already some clever techniques and ways to predict the impact. Is there any? Do you know any books which deal about this subject? Note: my question is not related to How do you deal with changing requirements? question. In fact, I'm not interested in evaluating the cost of a change, but rather the way to predict the parts of an application which will be concerned by the change. What will be those changes and how difficult they are really doesn't matter in my question.

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• How to name setter that does data conversion?

  - by IAdapter

  I'm struggling with how to name this method, I don't like the "set" prefix, because I feel it should be reserved for normal "dumb" setters and some tools might not like it (i did not check it in checkstyle, pmd, etc., but I got a feeling they won't like it.) for example (in java, but I feel its language agnostic) public void setActionListenerClicked(boolean actionListenerClicked) { this.actionListenerClicked = actionListenerClicked ? "1" : "0"; } The only purpose of this method is ONLY to set, this method is needed and cannot be joined with any other (because of framework used). P.S. I DO know that question is similar to How to name multi-setter?, but I feel its not the same question.

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• Layout Columns - Equal Height

  - by Kyle

  I remember first starting out using tables for layouts and learned that I should not be doing that. I am working on a new site and can not seem to do equal height columns without using tables. Here is an example of the attempt with div tags. <div class="row"> <div class="column">column1</div> <div class="column">column2</div> <div class="column">column3</div> <div style="clear:both"></div> </div> Now what I tried with that was doing making columns float left and setting their widths to 33% which works fine, I use the clear:both div so that the row would be the size of the biggest column, but the columns will be different sizes based on how much content they have. I have found many fixes which mostly involve css hacks and just making it look like its right but that's not what I want. I thought of just doing it in javascript but then it would look different for those who choose to disable their javascript. The only true way of doing it that I can think of is using tables since the cells all have equal heights in the same row. But I know its bad to use tables. After searching forever I than came across this: http://intangiblestyle.com/lab/equal-height-columns-with-css/ What it seems to do is exactly the same as tables since its just setting its display exactly like tables. Would using that be just as bad as using tables? I honestly can't find anything else that I could do. edit @Su' I have looked into "faux columns" and do not think that is what I want. I think I would be able to implement better designs for my site using the display:table method. I posted this question because I just wasn't sure if I should since I have always heard its bad using tables in website layouts.

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• Help identify the pattern for reacting on updates

  - by Mike

  There's an entity that gets updated from external sources. Update events are at random intervals. And the entity has to be processed once updated. Multiple updates may be multiplexed. In other words there's a need for the most current state of entity to be processed. There's a point of no-return during processing where the current state (and the state is consistent i.e. no partial update is made) of entity is saved somewhere else and processing goes on independently of any arriving updates. Every consequent set of updates has to trigger processing i.e. system should not forget about updates. And for each entity there should be no more than one running processing (before the point of no-return) i.e. the entity state should not be processed more than once. So what I'm looking for is a pattern to cancel current processing before the point of no return or abandon processing results if an update arrives. The main challenge is to minimize race conditions and maintain integrity. The entity sits mainly in database with some files on disk. And the system is in .NET with web-services and message queues. What comes to my mind is a database queue-like table. An arriving update inserts row in that table and the processing is launched. The processing gathers necessary data before the point of no-return and once it reaches this barrier it looks into the queue table and checks whether there're more recent updates for the entity. If there are new updates the processing simply shuts down and its data is discarded. Otherwise the processing data is persisted and it goes beyond the point of no-return. Though it looks like a solution to me it is not quite elegant and I believe this scenario may be supported by some sort of middleware. If I would use message queues for this then there's a need to access the queue API in the point of no-return to check for the existence of new messages. And this approach also lacks elegance. Is there a name for this pattern and an existing solution?

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• Is there a simple isometric graphical game engine (using vectors?) that could be used for a (multiplayer) crafting/farming game? [closed]

  - by Renier Wijnen

  Possible Duplicate: Good, free isometric game engine? With little game development experience (albeit having graphical skills and some programming knowledge) a group currently working on a game used to explain permaculture through interaction would like to create a simple concept game. Is there a specific engine or set of tools we could used to achieve this? Being able to make it an (online) multiplayer game would be much preferred. Thank you in advance for your input.

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• Designing exceptions for conversion failures

  - by Mr.C64

  Suppose there are some methods to convert from "X" to "Y" and vice versa; the conversion may fail in some cases, and exceptions are used to signal conversion errors in those cases. Which would be the best option for defining exception classes in this context? A single XYConversionException class, with an attribute (e.g. an enum) specifying the direction of the conversion (e.g. ConversionFromXToY, ConversionFromYToX). A XYConversionException class, with two derived classes ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException. ConversionFromXToYException and ConversionFromYToXException classes without a common base class.

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• I need an approach to the problem of preventing inserting duplicate records into the database

  - by Maurice

  Apologies is this question is asked on the incorrect "stack" A webservice that I call returns a list of data. The data from the webservice is updated periodically, so a call to the webservice done in one hour could return the same data as a call done in an hour. Also, the data is returned based on a start and end date. We have multiple users that can run the webservice search, and duplicate data is most likely to be returned (especially for historical data). However I don't want to insert this duplicate data in the database. I've created a db table in which the data is stored (most important columns are) Id int autoincrement PK Date date not null --The date to which the data set belongs. LastUpdate date not null --The date the data set was last updated. UserName varchar(50) --The name of the user doing the search. I use sql server 2008 express with c# 4.0 and visual studio 2010. Entity Framework is used as the ORM. If stored procedures could be avoided in the proposed solution, then that will be a plus. Another way of looking interpreting what I'm asking a solution for is as follows: I have a million unique records in my table. A user does a new search. The search results from the user contains around 300k of the data that is already in the db. An efficient solution to finding an inserting only the unique records is needed.

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• Interface extension

  - by user877329

  Suppose that I have an input stream interface, which defines a method for reading data. I also have a seekable interface which defines a method for seeking. A natural way of defining a input file is then to implement both input stream and seekable. I want to construct a data decoder from the input stream interface so I can read data from a file or from another stream. The problem is that I also want to implement seek functionality to the data decoder, since I want to be able to step individual records not raw bytes. This is not possible if I only provide an input stream, which does not have the bytewise seek method. Should I skip the seekable interface and add the seek method to input stream instead and force all streams to at least leave it as a nop.

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• Whats a good structure to save and retrieve locations of images?

  - by Goot

  I got a java-ee application, where I collect informations about movies. Im my backend I provide data like the name, description, genre and a random uuid. I also got lots of related files, which are stored on a file server. Including some screenshots, the dvd or bluRay cover and video trailers. My current approach is: When saving the files to the fileserver, I retrieve the movies random uuid (which is the primary key btw.). I then rename the files screenshot_[UUID]_1, screenshot_[UUID]_2 ... etc. Now, there are lots of other ways to handle this, like saving all filenames in a database or creating a dir structure on the fileserver for every uuid and, e.g., return all images in the "[uuid]/screenshots" folder via REST. I expect about 30k requests a day, so the service has to be pretty performant. Whats the best way to solve this?

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• How should I write new code when the old codebase and the environment uses lots of globals in PHP

  - by Nicola Peluchetti

  I'm working in the Wordpress environment which itself heavily relies on globals and the codebase I'm maintaining introduces some more. I want this to change and so I'm trying to think how should I handle this. For the globals our code has introduced I think I will set them as dependencies in the constructor or in getter / setter so that I don't rely on them being globals and then refactor the old codebase little by little so that we have no globals. With Wordpress globals I was thinking to wrap all WP globals inside a Wrapper class and hide them in there. Like this class WpGlobals { public static function getDb() { global $wpdb; return $wpdb; } } Would this be of any help? The idea is that I centralize all globals in one class and do not scatter them through the code, so that if Wordpress kills one of them I need to modify code only in one place. What would you do?

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• How to store prices that have effective dates?

  - by lal00

  I have a list of products. Each of them is offered by N providers. Each providers quotes us a price for a specific date. That price is effective until that provider decides to set a new price. In that case, the provider will give the new price with a new date. The MySQL table header currently looks like: provider_id, product_id, price, date_price_effective Every other day, we compile a list of products/prices that are effective for the current day. For each product, the list contains a sorted list of the providers that have that particular product. In that way, we can order certain products from whoever happens to offer the best price. To get the effective prices, I have a SQL statement that returns all rows that have date_price_effective >= NOW(). That result set is processed with a ruby script that does the sorting and filtering necessary to obtain a file that looks like this: product_id_1,provider_1,provider_3,provider8,provider_10... product_id_2,provider_3,provider_2,provider1,provider_10... This works fine for our purposes, but I still have an itch that a SQL table is probably not the best way to store this kind of information. I have that feeling that this kind of problema has been solved previously in other more creative ways. Is there a better way to store this information other than in SQL? or, if using SQL, is there a better approach than the one I'm using?

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• Designing a simple snake A.I

  - by DillPixel

  I've looked at some stuff online regarding this specific topic, and a lot of the info that I read involved graphs and path finding. I really don't want to get involved in something too complex & out of my level, and also I don't need my snake to be that intelligent (it will be a large board with the snake not growing in size on every munch). How could you structure a simpler AI for the snake that gets the job done relatively well? I would be able to get the snake to move towards the food item correctly, but my issue is that I'm not sure how to deal with the snake colliding with itself. Say the snake has a look ahead, and it finds that its tail is in the way, it could change direction, but what happens next? Any ideas on how to tackle this? Should the snake build an instruction set from every square, or should it think on the go?

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• How to handle status columns in designing tables

  - by altsyset

  How to handle multiple statuses for a table entry, for example an item table may have an active, inactive, fast moving, and/or batch statuses. And I wanted to handle them in single column with VARCHAR type. Also I might set each of those attributes as a boolean with different columns. But I am not sure what consequences this might lead to. So if you have experienced such situations which one would be the best way to handle it?

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• State Pattern - should a state know about its context?

  - by Extrakun

  I am referring to the state pattern as described in this link. In the example class diagram, a context has numerous states. However, it does not show how does a state communicates with a context (perhaps an input in a state has impact on a setting in the context). The two examples on the page shows either passing the context to the state via a function, or storing a reference to the context. Are those advisable? Are there other ways for a state to communicate with a context? Update to an edit: For instance, I am doing a remote control which can have several states. Say, the context has a setting for Volume, and I am in one of the states which allow me to tweak the volume. How should the state communicates with the context that the volume is being changed?

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• Ranking players depending on decision making during a game

  - by tabchas

  How would I go about a ranking system for players that play a game? Basically, looking at video games, players throughout the game make critical decisions that ultimately impact the end game result. Is there a way or how would I go about a way to translate some of those factors (leveling up certain skills, purchasing certain items, etc.) into something like a curve that can be plotted on a graph? This game that I would like to implement this is League of Legends. Example: Player is Level 1 in the beginning. Gets a kill very early in the game (he gets gold because of the kill and it increases his "power curve"), and purchases attack damage (gives him more damage which also increases his "power curve". However, the player that he killed (Player 2), buys armor (counters attack damage). This slightly increases Player 2's own power curve, and reduces Player 1's power curve. There's many factors I would like to take into account. These relative factors (example: BECAUSE Player 2 built armor, and I am mainly attack damage, it lowers my OWN power curve) seem the hardest to implement. My question is this: Is there a certain way to approach this task? Are there similar theoretical concepts behind ranking systems that I should read up on? I've seen the ELO system, but it doesn't seem what I want since it simply takes into account wins and losses.

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