Search Results

Search found 14074 results on 563 pages for 'programmers'.

Page 214/563 | < Previous Page | 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221  | Next Page >

• Architectural Composition Languages

  - by C. Lawrence Wenham

  Recently stumbled upon this paper (PDF) talking about ACLs, or Architectural Composition Languages. They're a fusion of two earlier lines of research: Architectural Definition Languages (such as UML) and Object Composition Languages (such as XAML, WWF, or scripting languages). The goal of an ACL is to have a high-level description of a program's architecture which can also be compiled into a runnable program. The high-level description assists automated analysis, while the 'executability' means changes can be tested immediately. You would still author the components of the program in a conventional programming language (C, Java, Python, etc), but they would be composed into a complete program by the ACL. One of the expected benefits is that a program can be ported to a different platform by swapping in "similar but different" components. I've been hankering for something like this for a long time (see this answer I gave on a StackOverflow question a few years ago). The paper mentions that the researchers were working on a language called ACL/1 that initially targeted Java, but would be ported to support .Net as well. However, I can't find any more mention of ACL/1 anywhere. Has there been any more work done on this? Are there any other implementations of the ACL concept that are available for use or experimentation?

  Read the article

• GPL'ing code of a third party?

  - by Mark

  I am facing the following dilemma at the moment. I am using code from a scientific paper in a commercial project. So basically I copied and pasted the code from the paper's pdf into my code editor and use it in my own code. The code in the paper does not have any copy restrictions or license(like the GPL) so I thought I would be ok using it in a commercial project. However, I have seen several gpl licensed open source projects that use the exact same code from the paper to the point of having the same variable names like in the paper. So what happened here is that a gpl license was put on a third parties non gpl'ed code. Are these open source projects in violation of the gpl or would I be in violation of the gpl because I use code which has been gpl'ed? My common sense tells me it is not allowed to gpl somebody elses non-gpl'ed (like in this case from the paper) code but I though I would ask anyway.

  Read the article

• What are the IEEE and ACM good for?

  - by Joshua Fox

  Membership in the IEEE and ACM is sometimes portrayed as a sign of professionalism. But all that is involved, as far as I can tell, is sending them your money. In return, besides the potential resume line, these organizations sponsor conferences and journals. I can always attend a conference or subscribe to or submit a paper to a journal, whether I am a member or not. If being a member makes some of that cheaper, or is a prerequisite for admission then OK, but I still don't see the purpose of these organizations. The answer, as far as I can gather, is that their most important value is to provide some reading material. I'd suggest that this is not worth the money given the wide availability of other valuable reading materials.

  Read the article

• Publish/Subscribe/Request for exchange of big, complex, and confidential data?

  - by Morten

  I am working on a project where a website needs to exchange complex and confidential (and thus encrypted) data with other systems. The data includes personal information, technical drawings, public documents etc. We would prefer to avoid the Request-Reply pattern to the dependent systems (and there are a LOT of them), as that would create an awful lot of empty traffic. On the other hand, I am not sure that a pure Publisher/Subscriber pattern would be apropriate -- mainly because of the complex and bulky nature of the data to be exchanged. For that reason we have discussed the possibility of a "publish/subscribe/request" solution. The Publish/Subscribe part would be to publish a message to the dependent systems, that something is ready for pickup. The actual content is then picked up by old-school Request-Reply action. How does this sound to you?? Regards, Morten

  Read the article

• What are some reasonable arguments in favor of closed source software? [closed]

  - by Goma

  I like a technology (including programming language) but its platform is closed sourece and many times I meet people who ask me, "why do you use a closed source platform, why not use an open source alternative? If there is something wrong it should be with the closed source not with the open source, (as they say)". Actually I don't know how to answer their question. Could anyone tell me a good answer? Why do you use a closed source platform?

  Read the article

• What to Return with Async CRUD methods

  - by RualStorge

  While there is a similar question focused on Java, I've been in debates with utilizing Task objects. What's the best way to handle returns on CRUD methods (and similar)? Common returns we've seen over the years are: Void (no return unless there is an exception) Boolean (True on Success, False on Failure, exception on unhandled failure) Int or GUID (Return the newly created objects Id, 0 or null on failure, exception on unhandled failure) The updated Object (exception on failure) Result Object (Object that houses the manipulated object's ID, Boolean or status field to with success or failure indicated, Exception information if there was one, etc) The concern comes into play as we've started moving over to utilizing C# 5's Async functionality, and this brought the question up of how we should handle CRUD returns large-scale. In our systems we have a little of everything in regards to what we return, we want to make these returns standardized... Now the question is what is the recommended standard? Is there even a recommended standard yet? (I realize we need to decide our standard, but typically we do so by looking at best practices, see if it makes sense for us and go from there, but here we're not finding much to work with)

  Read the article

• Does anyone else not enjoy this 'Required 15 Reputation' to vote situation? [migrated]

  - by Oliver Hyde

  I know, it's most likely the reason stackexchange has become so popular, by forcing people to actually contribute. But as a full-time lurker, and long time user (only recently signed up), it kind of bums me out that I don't get to give credit where credit is due. I don't generally asks questions because I always find a related question before I get myself into the situation where I need to ask and I don't like to answer questions myself as I don't consider myself experienced enough to be contributing effectively. Hopefully the first response to this post is a quick solution to getting 15 reputation points that I haven't seen, and I can just quickly delete this useless question, or maybe a concise paragraph explaining why my question is redundant and that I should go back to my lurky shadows of which I came from. All I want to do, is give credit to helpful comments/questions.

  Read the article

• How to create an auto-grader in and for Python

  - by recluze

  I'm trying to create an auto-grader for one of my beginning programming courses for python. From my online search, I've come to know that it is effectively a unit test framework that tests the student's code rather than production code but I'm not really sure how to structure the flow of the program. Can anyone please provide a strategy for submission of code by students and automating the whole process of marking? For instance, how would the student code be submitted and then stored/structured on disk, how would the grades be stored/reported? I'm only looking for a broad strategy and will try on my own to fill in the blanks. (I asked this on stockoverflow.com initially but it's considered as off-topic and I was suggested to ask here.)

  Read the article

• php templating with codeigniter

  - by JaPerk14

  I am currently develop a website application in codeigniter, and I'd like to do something in PHP / CodeIgniter where I can make a common template for separate sections of the website. I was thinking that I would keep the header / footer in a separate php files & include them separately. The thing I'm not sure about is the content beneath the header and above the footer. This website application will contain a lot of different pages, so I'm having a hard time figuring how what's the best way to do this.

  Read the article

• Why does this static field always get initialized over-eagerly?

  - by TheSilverBullet

  I am looking at this excellent article from Jon Skeet. While executing the demo code, Jon Skeet says that we can expect three different kinds of behaviours. To quote that article: The runtime could decide to run the type initializer on loading the assembly to start with... Or perhaps it will run it when the static method is first run... Or even wait until the field is first accessed... When I try this out (on framework 4), I always get the first result. That is, the static method is initialized before the assembly is loaded. I have tried running this multiple times and get the same result. (I tried both the debug and release versions) Why is this so? Am I missing something?

  Read the article

• Customizing the NUnit GUI for data-driven testing

  - by rwong

  My test project consists of a set of input data files which is fed into a piece of legacy third-party software. Since the input data files for this software are difficult to construct (not something that can be done intentionally), I am not going to add new input data files. Each input data file will be subject to a set of "test functions". Some of the test functions can be invoked independently. Other test functions represent the stages of a sequential operation - if an earlier stage fails, the subsequent stages do not need to be executed. I have experimented with the NUnit parametrized test case (TestCaseAttribute and TestCaseSourceAttribute), passing in the list of data files as test cases. I am generally satisfied with the the ability to select the input data for testing. However, I would like to see if it is possible to customize its GUI's tree structure, so that the "test functions" become the children of the "input data". For example: File #1 CheckFileTypeTest GetFileTopLevelStructureTest CompleteProcessTest StageOneTest StageTwoTest StageThreeTest File #2 CheckFileTypeTest GetFileTopLevelStructureTest CompleteProcessTest StageOneTest StageTwoTest StageThreeTest This will be useful for identifying the stage that failed during the processing of a particular input file. Is there any tips and tricks that will enable the new tree layout? Do I need to customize NUnit to get this layout?

  Read the article

• What is a good stopword in full text indexation?

  - by Benoit

  When you go to the Appendix D in Oracle Text Reference they provide lists of stopwords used by Oracle Text when indexing table contents. When I see the English list, nothing puzzles me. But the reason why the French list includes moyennant (French for in view of which) for example is unclear. Oracle has probably thought it through more than once before including it. How would you constitute a list of appropriate stopwords if you were to design an indexer?

  Read the article

• Need explanation of hexagonal architecture

  - by Victor Grazi

  I am reading about Alistair Cockburn's Hexagonal Architecture http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture with interest. One claim he makes is: "Finally, the automated function regression tests detect any violation of the promise to keep business logic out of the presentation layer. The organization can detect, and then correct, the logic leak." I do not understand this point. Is he saying that because the test is headless, then calls to a ui layer will throw exceptions? That doesn't seem to be a very sound test!

  Read the article

• still about perl vs python but (to me) slightly different from what has been asked [closed]

  - by B Chen

  Being a newbie to coding, I read from this site that Perl is still as viable as it has been, while Python, quoted from someone else's post, is good but just "snake oil" (not sure what this refers to exactly though). So from the responses in that post, I got the gist that Perl is good and worthy to learn. My question is - pardon me for phrasing it in this "non-programmer's" way - Which one should I learn FIRST? (I am actually currently learning R) Here below is the background info - (a) I will be using it mostly for data mining and statistics analysis (b) Will there be this "first" and "later" issue with learning either Perl or Python? That is, after I become competent with one language, would there be a need to learn the second one (for a similar task??) (c) If there should be circumstances where I must learn the second one, would learning Perl FIRST be better than learning Python? I hope to learn as much from exchanging info here, so please help provide with more than just "it depends" type of info. Great many thanks to all who choose to respond to my query.

  Read the article

• How should I determine my rates for writing custom software?

  - by Carson Myers

  For a custom software that will likely take a year or more to develop, how would I go about determining what to charge as a consultant? I'm having a hard time coming up with a number, and searches online are providing vastly different numbers (between $55/hr and $300/hr). I don't want to shoot too low because it's going to take me so much time (and I'm deferring my education for this project). I also don't want to shoot too high and get unpleasant looks and demand for justification. FWIW I live in Canada, and have approx. 10 years of development experience. I've read the "take your salary and divide it by 1000" rule of thumb, but the thing is I don't have a salary. Currently I'm just doing fairly small programming tasks for a friend who is starting a marketing company, pricing each task fairly arbitrarily. I don't know what I would make over the course of a year doing it, but it would be incredibly low. My responsibilities for the project would be the architecture, programming, database, server, and UX to some degree. It's going to be a public facing web service so I will also need to put a lot of effort into security and scalability. Any advice or experience?

  Read the article

• When does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  - by Petr

  For the sake of argument here's a sample function that prints contents of a given file line-by-line. Version 1: void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); cout << line << endl; } } I know it is recommended that functions do one thing at one level of abstraction. To me, though code above does pretty much one thing and is fairly atomic. Some books (such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Code) seem to suggest breaking the above code into separate functions. Version 2: void printLine(const string & line) { cout << line << endl; } void printLines(fstream & file) { string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); printLine(line); } } void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); printLines(file); } I understand what they want to achieve (open file / read lines / print line), but isn't it a bit of overkill? The original version is simple and in some sense already does one thing - prints a file. The second version will lead to a large number of really small functions which may be far less legible than the first version. Wouldn't it be, in this case, better to have the code at one place? At which point does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  Read the article

• What are the steps to grouping related classes into packages

  - by user2368481

  I've been googling this for some time, but what I haven't found are the clear steps needed to be taken to group related classes into packages in Java. In my case, I have about a number of .java files that I'd like to group into 3 packages according to the MVC pattern. One package for Model classes, one package for View classes and one package for Controller classes. I've identified which belong in what package, but not sure of the next step.

  Read the article

• How do we keep dependent data structures up to date?

  - by Geo

  Suppose you have a parse tree, an abstract syntax tree, and a control flow graph, each one logically derived from the one before. In principle it is easy to construct each graph given the parse tree, but how can we manage the complexity of updating the graphs when the parse tree is modified? We know exactly how the tree has been modified, but how can the change be propagated to the other trees in a way that doesn't become difficult to manage? Naturally the dependent graph can be updated by simply reconstructing it from scratch every time the first graph changes, but then there would be no way of knowing the details of the changes in the dependent graph. I currently have four ways to attempt to solve this problem, but each one has difficulties. Nodes of the dependent tree each observe the relevant nodes of the original tree, updating themselves and the observer lists of original tree nodes as necessary. The conceptual complexity of this can become daunting. Each node of the original tree has a list of the dependent tree nodes that specifically depend upon it, and when the node changes it sets a flag on the dependent nodes to mark them as dirty, including the parents of the dependent nodes all the way down to the root. After each change we run an algorithm that is much like the algorithm for constructing the dependent graph from scratch, but it skips over any clean node and reconstructs each dirty node, keeping track of whether the reconstructed node is actually different from the dirty node. This can also get tricky. We can represent the logical connection between the original graph and the dependent graph as a data structure, like a list of constraints, perhaps designed using a declarative language. When the original graph changes we need only scan the list to discover which constraints are violated and how the dependent tree needs to change to correct the violation, all encoded as data. We can reconstruct the dependent graph from scratch as though there were no existing dependent graph, and then compare the existing graph and the new graph to discover how it has changed. I'm sure this is the easiest way because I know there are algorithms available for detecting differences, but they are all quite computationally expensive and in principle it seems unnecessary so I'm deliberately avoiding this option. What is the right way to deal with these sorts of problems? Surely there must be a design pattern that makes this whole thing almost easy. It would be nice to have a good solution for every problem of this general description. Does this class of problem have a name?

  Read the article

• bug: deviation from requirements vs deviation from expectations

  - by user970696

  I am not clear on this one. No matter the terminology, in the end the software fault/bug causes (according to a lot of sources): Deviation from requirements Devation from expectations But if the expectations are not in requirements, then stakeholder could see a bug everywhere as he expected it to be like this or that..So how can I really know? I did read that specification can miss things and then of course its expected but not specified (by mistake).

  Read the article

• Is there a good book to grok C++?

  - by Paperflyer

  This question got me thinking. I would say I am a pretty experienced C++ programmer. I use it a lot at work, I had some courses on it at the university, I can understand most C++ code I find out there without problems. Other languages you can pretty much learn by using them. But every time I use a new C++ library or check out some new C++ code by someone I did not know before, I discover a new set of idioms C++ has to offer. Basically, this has lead me to believe that there is a lot of stuff in C++ that might be worth knowing but that is not easily discoverable. So, is there a good book for a somewhat experienced C++ programmer to step up the game? You know, to kind of 'get' that language the way you can 'get' Ruby or Objective-C, where everything just suddenly makes sense and you start instinctively knowing 'that C++ way of thing'?

  Read the article

• How does throwing an ArgumentNullException help?

  - by Scott Whitlock

  Let's say I have a method: public void DoSomething(ISomeInterface someObject) { if(someObject == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("someObject"); someObject.DoThisOrThat(); } I've been trained to believe that throwing the ArgumentNullException is "correct" but an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error means I have a bug. Why? I know that if I was caching the reference to someObject and using it later, then it's better to check for nullity when passed in, and fail early. However, if I'm dereferencing it on the next line, why are we supposed to do the check? It's going to throw an exception one way or the other. Edit: It just occurred to me... does the fear of the dereferenced null come from a language like C++ that doesn't check for you (i.e. it just tries to execute some method at memory location zero + method offset)?

  Read the article

• How to drastically improve code coverage?

  - by Peter Kofler

  I'm tasked with getting a legacy application under unit test. First some background about the application: It's a 600k LOC Java RCP code base with these major problems massive code duplication no encapsulation, most private data is accessible from outside, some of the business data also made singletons so it's not just changeable from outside but also from everywhere. no business model, business data is stored in Object[] and double[][], so no OO. There is a good regression test suite and an efficient QA team is testing and finding bugs. I know the techniques how to get it under test from classic books, e.g. Michael Feathers, but that's too slow. As there is a working regression test system I'm not afraid to aggressively refactor the system to allow unit tests to be written. How should I start to attack the problem to get some coverage quickly, so I'm able to show progress to management (and in fact to start earning from safety net of JUnit tests)? I do not want to employ tools to generate regression test suites, e.g. AgitarOne, because these tests do not test if something is correct.

  Read the article

• To implement registration page with Vaadin or not?

  - by JVerstry

  This is a tactical implementation question about usage of Vaadin or in some part of my application. Vaadin is a great framework to login users and implement sophisticated web applications with many pages. However, I think it is not very well suited to desgin pages to register new users for my application. Am I right? Am I am wrong? It seems to me that a simple HTML/CSS/Javascript login + email registration + confirmation email with confirmation link cannot be implemented easily with Vaadin. It seems like Vaadin would be overkill. Do you agree? Or am I missing something? I am looking for feedback from experienced Vaadin users.

  Read the article

• Public Speaking in software development.

  - by mummey

  Greetings my fellow cubicle dwellers. I've found my role gradually change from "feature-maintainer" to "feature-developer". While much of the former would consist of fixing and/or updating an existing feature (and quietly grumbling about it's implementation with complete naiveté), in this new role I find: Have to communicate with immediate management to define the development requirements to turnaround the new feature Have to communicate with design to determine the user requirements of the new feature Have to communicate with QA to determine test sets for the new feature, as well as it's current state during development. Have to communicate with producers/project-managers to define remaining turnaround time as well as updates in development requirements. and finally, have to occasionally communicate with upper-management to defend the new feature and demonstrate it's minimized risk to the upcoming release. The last item is key here, and this took me a couple occasions to completely realize. In all, though, it becomes very apparent that communication skills ARE important, even or especially as such for developers who feel they 'own' the feature they're working on. All of this said, I recognize it's importance and would like to improve my skills in this area further. I enjoy one-on-one communication but find I tend to stutter a bit when speaking to any group larger than a few people I know well. Where can I find good resources to improve my own communication skills?

  Read the article

• Why don't we just fix Javascript?

  - by Jan Meyer

  Javascript sucks because of a few fatalities well pointed out by Douglas Crockford. We talk a lot about it. But the point here is, why we don't fix it? Coffeescript of course does that and a lot more. But the question here is another: if we provide a webservice that can convert one version of Javascript to the next, and so on, we can keep the language up to date. Such a conversion allows old code to run, albeit with an ever-increasing startup delay, as newer browsers convert old code to the new syntax. To avoid that delay, the site only needs to take the output of the code-transform and paste it in! The effort has immediate benefits for those businesses interested in the results. The rest can sleep tight: their code will continue to run. If we provide backward code-transformation also, then elder browsers can also run ANY new code! Migration scripts should be created by those that make changes to a language. Today they don't, which is in itself a fundamental omission! It should be am obvious part of their job to provide them, as their job isn't really done without them. The onus of making it work should be on them. With this system Any site will be able to run in Any browser, but new code will run best on the newest browsers. This way we reap the benefit of an up-to-date and productive development environment, where today we suffer, supposedly because of yesterday. This is a misconception. We are all trapped in committee-thinking, and we drag along things that only worsen our performance over time! We cause an ever increasing complexity that is hard to underestimate. Javascript is easily fixed. The fact is we don't. As an example, I have seen Patrick Michaud tackle the migration problem in PmWiki. It included forward migration scripts. Whenever syntax changes were made, a migration script was added to transform pages to the new syntax. As far as I know, ALL migrations have worked flawlessly. In other words, we don't tackle the migration problem, we just drag it along. We are incompetent! And why is that? Because technically incompetent people feel they must decide for us. Because they are incompetent, fear rules them. They are obnoxiously conservative, and we suffer the consequence of bad leadership. But the competent don't need to play by the same rules. They can (and must) change them. They are the path forward. It is about time to leave the past behind, and pursue the leanest meanest, no, eternal functionality. That would in and of itself revolutionize programming. So, why don't we stop whining and fix programming? Begin with Javascript and change the world. Even if the browser doesn't hook into this system, coders could. So language updaters should take it upon them to provide migration scripts. Once they exist, browsers may take advantage of them.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221  | Next Page >