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• Can anyone explain to me what problem Core Data solves?

  - by Curtis Sumpter

  Core Data seems to add a needless layer of complexity. If you want to save data created natively by the user in an app why not just use an object and then write the data all to SQLite or back to a server using a RESTful script if necessary. Android doesn't have Core Data (though if it has something similar I haven't seen it.). What the heck is the point of buggy CD except useless needless overhead for people who can't write SQL or CGI scripts?

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• Is Java's ElementCollection Considered a Bad Practice?

  - by SoulBeaver

  From my understanding, an ElementCollection has no primary key, is embedded with the class, and cannot be queried. This sounds pretty hefty, but it allows me the comfort of writing an enum class which also helps with internationalization (using the enum key for lookup in my ResourceBundle). Example: We have a user on a media site and he can choose in which format he downloads the files @Entity @Table(name = "user") public class User { /* snip other fields */ @Enumerated @ElementCollection( targetClass = DownloadFilePreference.class, fetch = FetchType.EAGER ) @CollectionTable(name = "download_file_preference", joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "user_id") ) @Column(name = "name") private Set<DownloadFilePreference> downloadFilePreferences = new HashSet<>(); } public enum DownloadFilePreference { MP3, WAV, AIF, OGG; } This seems pretty great to me, and I suppose it comes down to "it depends on your use case", but I also know that I'm quite frankly only an initiate when it comes to Database design. Some best practices suggest to never have a class without a primary key- even in this case? It also doesn't seem very extensible- should I use this and gamble on the chance I will never need to query on the FilePreferences?

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• What is Mozilla's new release management strategy ?

  - by RonK

  I saw today that FireFox released a new version (5). I tried reading about what was added and ran into this link: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/06/firefox-5-released-arrives-only-three-months-after-firefox-4.ars It states that: Mozilla has launched Firefox 5, a new version of the popular open source Web browser. This is the first update that Mozilla has issued since adopting a new release management strategy that has drastically shortened the Firefox development cycle. I find this very intriguing - any idea what this new strategy is?

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• Using lookahead assertions in regular expressions

  - by Greg Jackson

  I use regular expressions on a daily basis, as my daily work is 90% in Perl (legacy codebase, but that's a different issue). Despite this, I still find lookahead and lookbehind to be terribly confusing and often unreadable. Right now, if I were to get a code review with a lookahead or lookbehind, I would immediately send it back to see if the problem can be solved by using multiple regular expressions or a different approach. The following are the main reasons I tend not to like them: They can be terribly unreadable. Lookahead assertions, for example, start from the beginning of the string no matter where they are placed. That, among other things, can cause some very "interesting" and non-obvious behaviors. It used to be the case that many languages didn't support lookahead/lookbehind (or supported them as "experimental features"). This isn't the case quite as much, but there's still always the question as to how well it's supported. Quite frankly, they feel like a dirty hack. Regexps often already are, but they can also be quite elegant, and have gained widespread acceptance. I've gotten by without any need for them at all... sometimes I think that they're extraneous. Now, I'll freely admit that especially the last two reasons aren't really good ones, but I felt that I should enumerate what goes through my mind when I see one. I'm more than willing to change my mind about them, but I feel that they violate some of my core tenets of programming, including: Code should be as readable as possible without sacrificing functionality -- this may include doing something in a less efficient, but clearer was as long as the difference is negligible or unimportant to the application as a whole. Code should be maintainable -- if another programmer comes along to fix my code, non-obvious behavior can hide bugs or make functional code appear buggy (see readability) "The right tool for the right job" -- I'm sure you can come up with contrived examples that could use lookahead, but I've never come across something that really needs them in my real-world development work. Is there anything that they're really the best tool for, as opposed to, say, multiple regexps (or, alternatively, are they the best tool for most cases they're used for today). My question is this: Is it good practice to use lookahead/lookbehind in regular expressions, or are they simply a hack that have found their way into modern production code? I'd be perfectly happy to be convinced that I'm wrong about this, and simple examples are useful for examples or illustration, but by themselves, won't be enough to convince me.

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• Data binding in web UI frameworks, what's the deal?

  - by c-smile

  I believe that most of modern Web frameworks that pretend to be MVC ones also has a notion of data binding in one form or another. Examples: AngularJS, EmberJS, KnockoutJS, etc. I am assuming that "data binding" is a declarative definition (oxymoron, no?) of live link between data (a.k.a. model) and its representation (a.k.a. view). With some transformers in between (a.k.a. controllers). I understand why declarativeness is kind of appealing but also understand that as usual it comes with the price. In particular: 1. Live binding is quite heavy, either with dirty watch (high CPU consumption) or with Object.observe() (high memory consumption with high CPU load in some scenarios). 2. There is a "frame" part in the framework word, means there are some boundaries/limits that can be hard to overcome if you need slightly more than it was designed for. Quite usual time split: 90% of features are made in 10% of project time. But 10% rest take 90% of project time. I suspect (a.k.a. educated guess) that those MVC things are not helping to implement more functionality in less time... If so their usage motivation is not quite clear. As an example: last week wanted to find virtual list idea/solution. Found one in vanilla JavaScript that is 120 LOC. Implementation of the same but in AngualrJS is about 420 LOC. Most of the code there seems like a fight with the framework itself... So is my question: what benefits that MVC stuff or data binding give us? Is it just a buzzword popular among project managers or they give us something useful. If later one then what exactly?

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• Have unit test generators helped you when working with legacy code?

  - by Duncan Bayne

  I am looking at a small (~70kLOC including generated) C# (.NET 4.0, some Silverlight) code-base that has very low test coverage. The code itself works in that it has passed user acceptance testing, but it is brittle and in some areas not very well factored. I would like to add solid unit test coverage around the legacy code using the usual suspects (NMock, NUnit, StatLight for the Silverlight bits). My normal approach is to start working through the project, unit testing & refactoring, until I am satisfied with the state of the code. I've done this many times in the past, and it's worked well. However, this time I'm thinking of using a test generator (in particular Pex) to create the test framework, then manually fleshing it out. My question is: have you used unit test generators in the past when commencing work on a legacy codebase, and if so, would you recommend them? My fear is that the generated tests will miss the semantic nuances of the code-base, leading to the dreaded situation of having tests for the sake of the coverage metric, rather than tests which clearly express the intended behaviour in code.

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• Should library classes be wrapped before using them in unit testing?

  - by Songo

  I'm doing unit testing and in one of my classes I need to send a mail from one of the methods, so using constructor injection I inject an instance of Zend_Mail class which is in Zend framework. Example: class Logger{ private $mailer; function __construct(Zend_Mail $mail){ $this->mail=$mail; } function toBeTestedFunction(){ //Some code $this->mail->setTo('some value'); $this->mail->setSubject('some value'); $this->mail->setBody('some value'); $this->mail->send(); //Some } } However, Unit testing demands that I test one component at a time, so I need to mock the Zend_Mail class. In addition I'm violating the Dependency Inversion principle as my Logger class now depends on concretion not abstraction. Does that mean that I can never use a library class directly and must always wrap it in a class of my own? Example: interface Mailer{ public function setTo($to); public function setSubject($subject); public function setBody($body); public function send(); } class MyMailer implements Mailer{ private $mailer; function __construct(){ $this->mail=new Zend_Mail; //The class isn't injected this time } function setTo($to){ $this->mailer->setTo($to); } //implement the rest of the interface functions similarly } And now my Logger class can be happy :D class Logger{ private $mailer; function __construct(Mailer $mail){ $this->mail=$mail; } //rest of the code unchanged } Questions: Although I solved the mocking problem by introducing an interface, I have created a totally new class Mailer that now needs to be unit tested although it only wraps Zend_Mail which is already unit tested by the Zend team. Is there a better approach to all this? Zend_Mail's send() function could actually have a Zend_Transport object when called (i.e. public function send($transport = null)). Does this make the idea of a wrapper class more appealing? The code is in PHP, but answers doesn't have to be. This is more of a design issue than a language specific feature

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• Is there an appropriate coding style for implementing an algorithm during an interview?

  - by GlenPeterson

  I failed an interview question in C years ago about converting hex to decimal by not exploiting the ASCII table if (inputDigitByte > 9) hex = inputDigitByte - 'a'. The rise of Unicode has made this question pretty silly, but the point was that the interviewer valued raw execution speed above readability and error handling. They tell you to review algorithms textbooks to prepare for these interviews, yet these same textbooks tend to favor the implementation with the fewest lines of code, even if it has to rely on magic numbers (like "infinity") and a slower, more memory-intensive implementation (like a linked list instead of an array) to do that. I don't know what is right. Coding an algorithm within the space of an interview has at least 3 constraints: time to code, elegance/readability, and efficiency of execution. What trade-offs are appropriate for interview code? How much do you follow the textbook definition of an algorithm? Is it better to eliminate recursion, unroll loops, and use arrays for efficiency? Or is it better to use recursion and special values like "infinity" or Integer.MAX_VALUE to reduce the number of lines of code needed to write the algorithm? Interface: Make a very self-contained, bullet-proof interface, or sloppy and fast? On the one extreme, the array to be sorted might be a public static variable. On the other extreme, it might need to be passed to each method, allowing methods to be called individually from different threads for different purposes. Is it appropriate to use a linked-list data structure for items that are traversed in one direction vs. using arrays and doubling the size when the array is full? Implementing a singly-linked list during the interview is often much faster to code and easier remember for recursive algorithms like MergeSort. Thread safety - just document that it's unsafe, or say so verbally? How much should the interviewee be looking for opportunities for parallel processing? Is bit shifting appropriate? x / 2 or x >> 1 Polymorphism, type safety, and generics? Comments? Variable and method names: qs(a, p, q, r) vs: quickSort(theArray, minIdx, partIdx, maxIdx) How much should you use existing APIs? Obviously you can't use a java.util.HashMap to implement a hash-table, but what about using a java.util.List to accumulate your sorted results? Are there any guiding principals that would answer these and other questions, or is the guiding principal to ask the interviewer? Or maybe this should be the basis of a discussion while writing the code? If an interviewer can't or won't answer one of these questions, are there any tips for coaxing the information out of them?

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• 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

  - by Philip

  I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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• User Acceptance Testing Defect Classification when developing for an outside client

  - by DannyC

  I am involved in a large development project in which we (a very small start up) are developing for an outside client (a very large company). We recently received their first output from UAT testing of a fairly small iteration, which listed 12 'defects', triaged into three categories : Low, Medium and High. The issue we have is around whether everything in this list should be recorded as a 'defect' - some of the issues they found would be better described as refinements, or even 'nice-to-haves', and some we think are not defects at all. They client's QA lead says that it is standard for them to label every issues they identify as a defect, however, we are a bit uncomfortable about this. Whilst the relationship is good, we don't see a huge problem with this, but we are concerned that, if the relationship suffers in the future, these lists of 'defects' could prove costly for us. We don't want to come across as being difficult, or taking things too personally here, and we are happy to make all of the changes identified, however we are a bit concerned especially as there is a uneven power balance at play in our relationship. Are we being paranoid here? Or could we be setting ourselves up for problems down the line by agreeing to this classification?

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• Help me select a "Simpler" target to create a new language: .NET, LLVM, Go, Own VM

  - by mamcx

  Lets define "Simple". This is my first language. I have no previous experience I will not dedicate +4 years to learn it properly. I'm a professional software [developer], but as an amateur in this area, I want instant gratification. If the idea shows a future, I could rewrite it. I don't want to do everything from scratch. In fact, if there exists a way to get GO (for example), change its syntax, add some sugar, give some extra functions and leave intact everything else, that would be perfect! From the example of coffescript/scala I think is better to build on top of some rich runtime like .NET/GO so I don't need to rewrite everything. HOWEVER, if is better other way, no problem for the first try! I want it in a week. I need it in a week so it will really take a month. Then it truly takes 3 months. But I don't want to put more that 3 months on this. I could reduce the scope of my language, but I hope the tools will help me a lot... I want to build a new language. Similar to python, but typed. I wonder what to build it on top of. I like the idea of building on top of GO. To get their sane (IMHO) OO paradigm (I plan to do the same, using interfaces, not inheritance), get goroutines and some other stuff. In my naive thinking I imagine that spit another language could help me to debug it more easily. However, look like everyone is building on top of something like .NET (don't like Java), LLVM or make it own VM. I read http://createyourproglang.com/ (great!) and the part of the VM look "easy" to me. So, what I need is the proper criteria and question I need to know in advance to have a fair shot at make this.

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• Ruby on Rails background API polling

  - by Matthew Turney

  I need to integrate a free/busy calendar integration with Zimbra. Unlike outlook, it seems, Zimbra requires polling their API. I need to be able to grab the free/busy data in background tasks for 10's of thousands of users on a regular time interval, preferably every few minutes. What would be the best way to implement this in a Rails application without bogging down our current resque tasks? I have considered moving this process to something like node.js or something similar in Ruby. The biggest problem is that we have no control over the IO, as each clients Zimbra instances could be slow and we don't want to create a huge backup in tasks. Thoughts and ideas?

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• Interviewing someone for general unix skills

  - by Christophe Vanfleteren

  How would you test a developer that claims to have *nix shell experience (just to be clear, we don't want to test if someone can develop on *nix, only that they know their way around the command line). I was thinking about making them solve a problem of getting information out of log files, which would involve some basics like cat, grep, cut, ... combined with piping. What other basic knowledge would you ask for? Once again, this isn't for interviewing someone who will develop for *nix systems, and also not for *nix system admins, but just for regular developers that sometimes need to do some work on a *nix system.

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• How can I implement an EPUB reader in JavaScript?

  - by Vlad Nicula

  I'm wondering if I can create an EPUB (free and open e-book standard) reader in JavaScript. The basic requirements would be: Server parts of the EPUB reader from a server API. Read the EPUB data in JavaScript. Render it on page. Provide some extra functionality, like text highlights or page notes. I have no information about how I could do this. I'm willing to try a prototype project. What are the steps that I could take towards implementing such a thing?

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• how to write good programming logic?

  - by user106616

  recently I got job as a java developer, and now I have assigned project too. I want to know what is a good logic? when I check in the code my team lead is saying that its a good code. But when it comes to my project manager he is saying that its a bad code. And he is changing my code, after his changes if I see his code its really very very good and even simple. can you please tell me how to develop the good program, good logic? what is the best way to structure a problem in terms of code?

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• Resources for up-to-date Delphi programming

  - by Dan Kelly

  I'm a developer in a small department and have been using Delphi for the last 10 years. Whilst I've tried to keep up-to-date with movements there are a lot of changes that have occurred between Delphi 7 and (current for us) 2010. Stack Exchange and here have been great for answering the "how do you" questions, but what I'd like is a resource that shows great examples of larger scale programming. For example is there anywhere that hosts examples of well written, multi form applications? Something that can be looked at as a whole to illustrate why things should be done a certain way?

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• Nearly technical books that you enjoyed reading

  - by pablo

  I've seen questions about "What books you recommend" in several of the Stack Exchange verticals. Perhaps these two questions (a and b) are the most popular. But, I'd like to ask for recommendations of a different kind of books. I have read in the past "The Passionate Programmer" and I am now reading "Coders at Work". Both of them I would argue that are almost a biography (or biographies in the "Coders at work") or even a bit of "self-help" book (that is more the case of the "Passionate programmer"). And please don't get me wrong. I loved reading the first one, and I am loving reading the second one. There's a lot of value in it, mostly in "lessons of the trade" kind of way. So, here is what I'd like to know. What other books that you read that are similar to these ones in intent that you enjoyed? Why?

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• What should every programmer know about web development?

  - by Joel Coehoorn

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

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• What's the best language combo for code generation?

  - by Peter Turner

  I read through Code Generation in Action but never bothered to make anything of it because Ruby just doesn't fit with my lifestyle at this juncture. The book came out more on the cusp of the C# revolution, and it said that C# "was a language designed to be generated", apparently using Ruby as the generator language. In your experience, what is the ideal combination of languages to generate the most useful code?

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• Should companies require developers to credit code they didn't write?

  - by sunpech

  In academia, it's considered cheating if a student copies code/work from someone/somewhere else without giving credit, and tries to pass it off as his/her own. Should companies make it a requirement for developers to properly credit all non-trivial code and work that they did not produce themselves? Is it useful to do so, or is it simply overkill? I understand there are various free licenses out there, but if I find stuff I like and actually use, I really feel compelled to give credit via comment in code even if it's not required by the license (or lack thereof one).

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• Syntax logic suggestions

  - by Anna

  This syntax will be used inside HTML attributes. Here are a few examples of what I have so far: <input name="a" conditions="!b, c" /> <input name="b" /> <input name="c" /> This will make input "a" do something if b is not checked and c is checked (b and c are assumed to be checkboxes if they don't have a :value defined) <input name="a" conditions="!b:foo|bar, c:foo" /> <input name="b" /> <input name="c" /> This will make input "a" do something if bdoesn't have foo or bar values, and if c has the foo value. <input name="a" conditions="!b:EMPTY" /> <input name="b" /> Makes input "a" do something if b has a value assigned. So, essentially , acts as logical AND, : as equals (=), ! as NOT, and | as OR. The | (OR) is only needed between values (at least I think so), and AND is not needed between values for obvious reasons :) EMPTY means empty value, like <input value="" /> Do you have any suggestions on improving this syntax, like making it more human friendly? For example I think the "EMPTY" keyword is not really appropriate and should be replaced with a character, but I don't know which one to choose.

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• Rule Engine in .net

  - by user641812

  I have to import data from excel to SQL database. Excel data contains various parameters and there value like P1,P1,P4,P5 etc. I have to apply business rules Like if( P1 100 and P1 < 200) then insert the record in database. Similarly in some cases string values are also validated. Can I have any open source rule engine that contains UI to change , add , delete the rules. Am using C# to read the excel and and insert the records One more thing which is best approach: Read excel first and store every record as an object in a collection, then iterate through the collection, apply business rules on every object and then insert record in the database Or Read one record from excel apply business rule and then insert record in the database. Repeat the process for whole excel.

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• moore's law and quadratic algorithm

  - by damon

  I was going thru a video (from coursera - by sedgewick) in which he argues that you cannot sustain Moore's law using a quadratic algorithm.He elaborates like this In year 197* you build a computer of power X ,and need to count N objects.This takes M days According to Moore's law,you have a computer of power 2X after 1.5 years.But now you have 2N objects to count. If you use a quadratic algorithm, In year 197*+1.5 ,it takes (4M)/2 = 2M days 4M because the algorithm is quadratic,and division by 2 because of doubling computer power. I find this hard to understand.I tried to work thru this as below To count N objects using comp=X , it takes M days. -> N/X = M After 1.5 yrs ,you need to count 2N objects using comp=2X -> 2N/(2X) -> N/X -> M days where do I go wrong? can someone please help me understand?

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• What is a recent programming language of choice for the AI?

  - by Eduard Florinescu

  For a few decades the programming language of choice for AI was either Prolog or LISP, and a few more others that are not so well known. Most of them were designed before the 70's. Changes happens a lot on many other domains specific languages, but in the AI domain it hadn't surfaced so much as in the web specific languages or scripting etc. Are there recent programming languages that were intended to change the game in the AI and learn from the insufficiencies of former languages?

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• Why is Silverlight so unstable? [closed]

  - by 0101

  I have never programmed in Silverlight, but I hate it. The reason is that I need it to watch videos on one of the site I watch, but like every other day I need to update the plugin. Why is Silverlight so unstable ??? they just can't get it right and I have to update that plugin all the time. P.S. I'm now thinking of somehow hacking that video stream and bypass the silverlight(so I could just throw it away). P.S. Its not updated like any other FF plugin, because its special and you need to download an exe ... pathethic.

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