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• Space-saving character encoding for japanese?

  - by Constantin

  In my opinion a common problem: character encoding in combination with a bitmap-font. Most multi-language encodings have an huge space between different character types and even a lot of unused code points there. So if I want to use them I waste a lot of memory (not only for saving multi-byte text - i mean specially for spaces in my bitmap-font) - and VRAM is mostly really valuable... So the only reasonable thing seems to be: Using an custom mapping on my texture for i.e. UTF-8 characters (so that no space is waste). BUT: This effort seems to be same with use an own proprietary character encoding (so also own order of characters in my texture). In my specially case I got texture space for 4096 different characters and need characters to display latin languages as well as japanese (its a mess with utf-8 that only support generall cjk codepages). Had somebody ever a similiar problem (I really wonder, if not)? If theres already any approach? Edit: The same Problem is described here http://www.tonypottier.info/Unicode_And_Japanese_Kanji/ but it doesnt provide an real solution how to save these bitmapfont mappings to utf-8 space efficent. So any further help is welcome!

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• alignment and granularity of mmap

  - by OwnWaterloo

  I am confused by the specification of mmap. Let pa be the return address of mmap (the same as the specification) pa = mmap(addr, len, prot, flags, fildes, off); In my opinion after the function call succeed the following range is valid [ pa, pa+len ) My question is whether the range of the following is still valid? [ round_down(pa, pagesize) , round_up(pa+len, pagesize) ) [ base, base + size ] for short That is to say: is the base always aligned on the page boundary? is the size always a multiple of pagesize (the granularity is pagesize in other words) Thanks for your help. I think it is implied in this paragraph : The off argument is constrained to be aligned and sized according to the value returned by sysconf() when passed _SC_PAGESIZE or _SC_PAGE_SIZE. When MAP_FIXED is specified, the application shall ensure that the argument addr also meets these constraints. The implementation performs mapping operations over whole pages. Thus, while the argument len need not meet a size or alignment constraint, the implementation shall include, in any mapping operation, any partial page specified by the range [pa,pa+len). But I'm not sure and I do not have much experience on POSIX. Please show me some more explicit and more definitive evidence Or show me at least one system which supports POSIX and has different behavior Thanks agian.

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• Proper Usage of SqlConnection in .NET

  - by Jojo

  Hi guys, I just want an opinion on the proper usage or a proper design with regards to using SqlConnection object. Which of the 2 below is the best use: A data provider class whose methods (each of them) contain SqlConnection object (and disposed when done). Like: IList<Employee> GetAllEmployees() { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(this.connectionString)) { // Code goes here... } } Employee GetEmployee(int id) { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(this.connectionString)) { // Code goes here... } } or SqlConnection connection; // initialized in constructor IList<Employee> GetAllEmployees() { this.TryOpenConnection(); // tries to open member SqlConnection instance // Code goes here... this.CloseConnection(); // return } Employee GetEmployee(int id) { this.TryOpenConnection(); // tries to open member SqlConnection instance // Code goes here... this.CloseConnection(); // return } Or is there a better approach than this? I have a focused web crawler type of application and this application will crawl 50 or more websites simultaneously (multithreaded) with each website contained in a crawler object and each crawler object has an instance of a data provider class (above). Please advise. Thanks.

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• Is Form validation and Business validation too much?

  - by Robert Cabri

  I've got this question about form validation and business validation. I see a lot of frameworks that use some sort of form validation library. You submit some values and the library validates the values from the form. If not ok it will show some errors on you screen. If all goes to plan the values will be set into domain objects. Here the values will be or, better said, should validated (again). Most likely the same validation in the validation library. I know 2 PHP frameworks having this kind of construction Zend/Kohana. When I look at programming and some principles like Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and single responsibility principle (SRP) this isn't a good way. As you can see it validates twice. Why not create domain objects that do the actual validation. Example: Form with username and email form is submitted. Values of the username field and the email field will be populated in 2 different Domain objects: Username and Email class Username {} class Email {} These objects validate their data and if not valid throw an exception. Do you agree? What do you think about this aproach? Is there a better way to implement validations? I'm confused about a lot of frameworks/developers handling this stuff. Are they all wrong or am I missing a point? Edit: I know there should also be client side kind of validation. This is a different ballgame in my Opinion. If You have some comments on this and a way to deal with this kind of stuff, please provide.

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• Android - Correspondence between ImageView coordinates and Bitmap Pixels

  - by Matteo

  In my application I want the user to be able to select some content of an Image contained inside an ImageView. To select the content I subclassed the ImageView class making it implement the OnTouchListener so to draw over it a rectangle with borders decided by the user. Here is an example of the result of the drawing (to have an idea you can think of it as when you click with the mouse on your desktop and drag the mouse): Now I need to determine which pixels of the Bitmap image correspond to the selected part. It's kind of easy to determine which are the points of the ImageView belonging to the rectangle, but I don't know how to get the correspondent pixels, since the ImageView has a different aspect ratio than the original image. I followed the approach described especially here, but also here, but am not fully satisfied because in my opinion the correspondence made is 1 on 1 between pixels and points on the ImageView and does not give me all the correspondent pixels on the original image to the selected area. Calling hoveredRect the rectangle on the ImageView the points inside of it are: class Point { float x, y; @Override public String toString() { return x + ", " + y; } } Vector<Point> pointsInRect = new Vector<Point>(); for( int x = hoveredRect.left; x <= hoveredRect.right; x++ ){ for( int y = hoveredRect.top; y <= hoveredRect.bottom; y++ ){ Point pointInRect = new Point(); pointInRect.x = x; pointInRect.y = y; pointsInRect.add(pointInRect); } } How can I obtain a Vector<Pixels> pixelsInImage containing the correspondent pixels?

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• How to implement web cache: internal fragmentation VS external fragmentation

  - by Summer_More_More_Tea

  Hi there: I come up with this question when play with Firefox web cache: in which approach does the browser cache a response in limited disk space(take my configuration as an example, 50MB is the upper bound)? I think two ways can be employed. One is cache the total response object one by one, but this is inefficient and will introduce external fragmentation, thus the total cache space may not be fully used. The second is take the total space(50MB) as a consecutive file, splitting it into fixed-length slots; incoming response objects will also be treated blocks of data with the same length as the slots. We can fill slots until the whole file is run out of, then some displacement algorithm can be used to swap out the old cached objects. The latter approach will of course bing in internal fragmentation, but in my opinion is easier to implement and maintain than the first strategy. But when I enter Firefox's Cache directory, I find it (maybe) use a different method: a lot of varied-length files reside in that directory and all those files are filled with undisplayable characters. I don't but really want to know what mechanism that a commercial browser, e.g. Firefoix, employed to implement web cache. Regards.

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• How to create extensible dynamic array in Java without using pre-made classes?

  - by AndrejaKo

  Yeah, it's a homework question, so givemetehkodezplsthx! :) Anyway, here's what I need to do: I need to have a class which will have among its attributes array of objects of another class. The proper way to do this in my opinion would be to use something like LinkedList, Vector or similar. Unfortunately, last time I did that, I got fire and brimstone from my professor, because according to his belief I was using advanced stuff without understanding basics. Now next obvious solution would be to create array with fixed number of elements and add checks to get and set which will see if the array is full. If it is full, they'd create new bigger array, copy older array's data to the new array and return the new array to the caller. If it's mostly empty, they'd create new smaller array and move data from old array to new. To me this looks a bit stupid. For my homework, there probably won't be more that 3 elements in an array, but I'd like to make a scalable solution without manually calculating statistics about how often is array filled, what is the average number of new elements added, then using results of calculation to calculate number of elements in new array and so on. By the way, there is no need to remove elements from the middle of the array. Any tips?

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• pluto or jetspeed on google app engine?

  - by Patrick Cornelissen

  I am trying to build something "portlet server"-ish on the google app engine. (as open source) I'd like to use the JSR168/286 standards, but I think that the restrictions of the app engine will make it somewhere between tricky and impossible. Has anyone tried to run jetspeed or an application that uses pluto internally on the google app engine? Based on my current knowledge of portlets and the google app engine I'm anticipating these problems: A war file with portlets is from the deployment standpoint more or less a complete webapp (yes, I know that it doesn't really work without a portal server). The war file may contain it's own web.xml etc. This makes deployment on the app engine rather difficult, because the apps are not visible to each other, so all portlet containing archives need to be included in the war file of the deployed "app engine based portal server". The "portlets" are (at least in liferay) started as permanent servlet processes, based on their portlet.xmls and web.xmls which is located in the same spot for every portlet archive that is loaded. I think this may be problematic in the app engine, because everything is in one big "web app", so it may be tricky to access the portlet.xmls from each archive. This prevents a 100% compatibility in my opinion. Is here anyone who has any experience with the combination of portlets and the app engine? Do you think it's feasible to modify jetspeed, pluto or any other portlet container to be able to run it on the app engine?

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• libav/ffmpeg: avcodec_decode_video2() returns -1 when separating demultiplexing and decoding

  - by unbekannt

  I'm using libav (from a C++ program on Linux and Windows) to decode video streams from a file, which works fine (decoding various formats like H264 and MPEG2) using avformat_open_input(), av_read_frame() and avcodec_decode_video2(). Now I have to separate demultiplexing and decoding. One class will call avformat_open_input() and av_read_frame() and then pass the AVPackets into a queue that is read by another class. There I use avcodec_alloc_context3() to get the AVCodecContext needed for avcodec_decode_video2(). I've tested that with a MPEG2 video stream and it works. Problems arise if I try to decode a H264 stream: avcodec_decode_video2() always returns -1 and outputs "no frame". I understand that additional data (SPS/PPS) is needed to decode this stream, so I've tried to replicate the original AVCodecContext from the demultiplexer in the decoder, but it won't work: Copying the content of the extradata field and setting all other values that differ from the default ones in the decoder: -1 is returned Using the same context (i.e. passing along the pointer) results in a crash I also tried to set CODEC_FLAG2_CHUNKS. avcodec_decode_video2() then always returns packet.size - 3 (??) and frameFinished is never set to 1. In my opinion I have a general problem here that will arise whenever settings from the original CodecContext are needed to decode the AVPackets. I'd be grateful for any hints on how to solve that problem!

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• Aspect-Oriented Programming in OOP world - breaking rules ?

  - by Maksim Kondratyuk

  Hi 2 all! When I worked on asp.net mvc web site project, I investigated different approaches for validation. Some of them were DataAnotation validation and Validation Block. They use attributes for setting up rules for validation. Like this: [Required] public string Name {get;set;} I was confused how this approach combines with SRP (single responsibilty principle) from OOP world. Also I don't like any business logic in business objects, I prefer "poor business objects" model, but when I decorate my business objects with validation attributes for real requirements, they become ugly (Has a lot of attributes / with localization logic and so on). Idea with attributes realy simple, but in my opinion the validation decoration should be separated from object. I'm not sure is the approach to separate validation rules to xml files or to another objects, maybe it is a solution. Another bad side of AOP - problems with unit testin such code. When I decorated some controller actions with custom attributes for example to import/export TempData between actions or initialize some required services I can't to write proper unit test for testing this actions. Do you think that attributes don't break srp or you just disregard this and think that it's simplest , is not worst way ? P.S. I read some likes articles and discussions and I just want to put things in proper order. P.P.S. sorry for my "fluent" english :=)

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• tipfy for Google App Engine: Is it stable? Can auth/session components of tipfy be used with webapp?

  - by cv12

  I am building a web application on Google App Engine that requires users to register with the application and subsequently authenticate with it and maintain sessions. I don't want to force users to have Google accounts. Also, the target audience for the application is the average non-geek, so I'm not very keen on using OpenID or OAuth. I need something simple like: User registers with an e-mail and password, and then can log back in with those credentials. I understand that this approach does not provide the security benefits of Google or OpenID authentication, but I am prepared to trade foolproof security for end-user convenience and hassle-free experience. I explored Django, but decided that consecutive deprecations from appengine-helper to app-engine-patch to django-nonrel may signal that path may be a bit risky in the long-term. I'd like to use a code base that is likely to be maintained consistently. I also explored standalone session/auth packages like gaeutilities and suas. GAEUtilities looked a bit immature (e.g., the code wasn't pythonic in places, in my opinion) and SUAS did not give me a lot of comfort with the cookie-only sessions. I could be wrong with my assessment of these two, so I would appreciate input on those (or others that may serve my objective). Finally, I recently came across tipfy. It appears to be based on Werkzeug and Alex Martelli spoke highly of it here on stackoverflow. I have two primary questions related to tipfy: As a framework, is it as mature as webapp? Is it stable and likely to be maintained for some time? Since my primary interest is the auth/session components, can those components of the tipfy framework be used with webapp, independent of the broader tipfy framework? If yes, I would appreciate a few pointers to how I could go about doing that.

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• Is jQuery forcing Adobe ColdFusion to abandon the dead flash product line?

  - by crosenblum

  I have been reading a lot about how flash development/design had died, and as jQuery and in the near future html5 comes out, will this start to push Adobe/Coldfusion away from flash towards less product linking? I mean, I love coldfusion, and want that to continue to grow, however, if Adobe only bought Coldfusion from Macromedia, so they can bundle flash and coldfusion together, does the death of flash mean the death of coldfusion? http://topnews.us/content/221385-jobs-says-adobes-flash-waning-and-had-its-day http://aext.net/2010/03/javascript-jquery-killing-flash-tutorial-jquery-plugin/ I really don't mind if Flash dies, I do mind greatly if coldfusion does. Is the success of Flash linked to Coldfusion? If so, why? or why not? The purpose of this isn't to start some war about flash pro's and con's. I was only worried that Adobe would cause problems for Coldfusion, if flash had some market/financial problems. That was my main concern... And no I am not anti-flash... But my financial sanity depends on Coldfusion being a success, so that is why I stated my question. Because I WANT EVERYONE ELSE'S OPINION OF THIS SITUATION. Thank You.

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• Unit tests - The benefit from unit tests with contract changes?

  - by Stefan Hendriks

  Recently I had an interesting discussion with a colleague about unit tests. We where discussing when maintaining unit tests became less productive, when your contracts change. Perhaps anyone can enlight me how to approach this problem. Let me elaborate: So lets say there is a class which does some nifty calculations. The contract says that it should calculate a number, or it returns -1 when it fails for some reason. I have contract tests who test that. And in all my other tests I stub this nifty calculator thingy. So now I change the contract, whenever it cannot calculate it will throw a CannotCalculateException. My contract tests will fail, and I will fix them accordingly. But, all my mocked/stubbed objects will still use the old contract rules. These tests will succeed, while they should not! The question that rises, is that with this faith in unit testing, how much faith can be placed in such changes... The unit tests succeed, but bugs will occur when testing the application. The tests using this calculator will need to be fixed, which costs time and may even be stubbed/mocked a lot of times... How do you think about this case? I never thought about it thourougly. In my opinion, these changes to unit tests would be acceptable. If I do not use unit tests, I would also see such bugs arise within test phase (by testers). Yet I am not confident enough to point out what will cost more time (or less). Any thoughts?

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• NHibernate slow mapping

  - by Rob A

  My question is what can I do to determine the cause of the slowness, or what can I do to speed it up without knowing the exact cause. I am running a simple query and it appears that the mapping back to the entities is taking taking forever. The result set is 350, which is not much data in my opinion. IRepository repo = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IRepository>(); var q = repo.Query<Order>(item => item.Ordereddate > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-40)); foreach (var order in q) { Console.WriteLine(order.TransactionNumber); } The profiler is telling me it is executing the query 7ms / 35257ms, I am assuming that the former is the actual response from the db and the latter is the time it takes NH to do it's magic. 35 seconds is too long. This is a simple mapping, one table, nested components, using fluent interface to do mappings. I just start up a simple console app and run the one query, the slowness is measured after the SessionFactory is initialized, there should only be one session, and I am not using a transaction. Thanks

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• Web development: Haskell or Scheme

  - by Robert E. Lester

  I would like to to choose one of these languages for building web applications. I'm not interested in framework per say, but have the following needs: Rapid development. Easy to scale. Strong community for the web. Quick and easy to deploy. I'm very familiar with Haskell, and have some familiarity with scheme (in particular PLT). Scheme appeals to me as good candidate for web development due to it's simple syntax which is homogenous across libraries. I state this despite my subjective opinion that Haskell is a 'cleaner' language. Haskell web apps seem to require learning and building a patchwork of different combinator libraries. On the plus side, I realise this can be quite expressive, although I'd prefer to eliminate impedance mismatches where possible. While scheme-plt looks to be a good fit, I can find but one example of it being used in the "real world". Haskell doesn't seem to fair too much better here, but there seems to be a bigger community behind the web side. Please help me make up my mind. For the most part I'm interested in real-world use cases.

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• Python alignment of assignments (style)

  - by ikaros45

  I really like following style standards, as those specified in PEP 8. I have a linter that checks it automatically, and definitely my code is much better because of that. There is just one point in PEP 8, the E251 & E221 don't feel very good. Coming from a JavaScript background, I used to align the variable assignments as following: var var1 = 1234; var2 = 54; longer_name = 'hi'; var lol = { 'that' : 65, 'those' : 87, 'other_thing' : true }; And in my humble opinion, this improves readability dramatically. Problem is, this is dis-recommended by PEP 8. With dictionaries, is not that bad because spaces are allowed after the colon: dictionary = { 'something': 98, 'some_other_thing': False } I can "live" with variable assignments without alignment, but what I don't like at all is not to be able to pass named arguments in a function call, like this: some_func(length= 40, weight= 900, lol= 'troll', useless_var= True, intelligence=None) So, what I end up doing is using a dictionary, as following: specs = { 'length': 40, 'weight': 900, 'lol': 'troll', 'useless_var': True, 'intelligence': None } some_func(**specs) or just simply some_func(**{'length': 40, 'weight': 900, 'lol': 'troll', 'useless_var': True, 'intelligence': None}) But I have the feeling this work around is just worse than ignoring the PEP 8 E251 / E221. What is the best practice?

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• Are women worse developers than men? [closed]

  - by Ekaterina

  Hi people, I am a software engineer and a woman. I constantly keep hearing all these jokes around me, about women in programming. They (they - stands for male colleagues) keep pointing out the differences in thinking between men and women. The truth is that when I started working as a developer, my colleagues gave a hard time only because I am a woman. They automatically assumed that I want to do only html and styling, and didn't even me giving me the chance to do something different. I am a .NET programmer and I really disliked (and still dislike) front-end developing. I do agree men and women think differently, but I don't agree that necessarily is a bad thing. Different approach of problems/goals brings more ideas and diversity. I really believe that there are good developer and bad developers despite the male/female factor. I am curious to hear overall opinion though. Would you not hire a woman developer only because is a woman? Cheers!

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• qtruby, QUiLoader and respond_to?

  - by Tim Sylvester

  I'm writing a simple Qt4 application in Ruby (using qtruby) to teach myself both. Mostly it has gone well, but in trying to use Ruby's "duck typing" I've run into a snag; respond_to? doesn't seem to reflect reality. irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems' => true irb(main):002:0> require 'Qt4' => true irb(main):003:0> require 'qtuitools' => true irb(main):004:0> Qt::Application.new(ARGV) => #<Qt::Application:0xc3c9a08 objectName="ruby"> irb(main):005:0> file = Qt::File.new("dlg.ui") { open(Qt::File::ReadOnly) } => #<Qt::File:0xc2e1748 objectName=""> irb(main):006:0> obj = Qt::UiLoader.new().load(file, nil) => #<Qt::Dialog:0xc2bf650 objectName="dlg", x=0, y=0, width=283, height=244> irb(main):007:0> obj.respond_to?('children') => false irb(main):008:0> obj.respond_to?(:children) => false irb(main):009:0> obj.children => [#<Qt::FormInternal::TranslationWatcher:0xc2a1980 objectName="">, ... As you can see, when I check to ensure that the object I get back from loading the UI file has a children accessor I get false. If call that accessor, however, I get an array rather than a NoMethodError. So, is this a bug or have I incorrectly understood respond_to?? This looks like the problem described here, but I thought I would get an expert opinion before filing a bug against the project.

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• @PrePersist with entity inheritance

  - by gerry

  I'm having some problems with inheritance and the @PrePersist annotation. My source code looks like the following: _the 'base' class with the annotated updateDates() method: @javax.persistence.Entity @Inheritance(strategy = InheritanceType.TABLE_PER_CLASS) public class Base implements Serializable{ ... @Id @GeneratedValue protected Long id; ... @Column(nullable=false) @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP) private Date creationDate; @Column(nullable=false) @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP) private Date lastModificationDate; ... public Date getCreationDate() { return creationDate; } public void setCreationDate(Date creationDate) { this.creationDate = creationDate; } public Date getLastModificationDate() { return lastModificationDate; } public void setLastModificationDate(Date lastModificationDate) { this.lastModificationDate = lastModificationDate; } ... @PrePersist protected void updateDates() { if (creationDate == null) { creationDate = new Date(); } lastModificationDate = new Date(); } } _ now the 'Child' class that should inherit all methods "and annotations" from the base class: @javax.persistence.Entity @NamedQueries({ @NamedQuery(name=Sensor.QUERY_FIND_ALL, query="SELECT s FROM Sensor s") }) public class Sensor extends Entity { ... // additional attributes @Column(nullable=false) protected String value; ... // additional getters, setters ... } If I store/persist instances of the Base class to the database, everything works fine. The dates are getting updated. But now, if I want to persist a child instance, the database throws the following exception: MySQLIntegrityConstraintViolationException: Column 'CREATIONDATE' cannot be null So, in my opinion, this is caused because in Child the method "@PrePersist protected void updateDates()" is not called/invoked before persisting the instances to the database. What is wrong with my code?

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• Python: circular imports needed for type checking

  - by phild

  First of all: I do know that there are already many questions and answers to the topic of the circular imports. The answer is more or less: "Design your Module/Class structure properly and you will not need circular imports". That is true. I tried very hard to make a proper design for my current project, I in my opinion I was successful with this. But my specific problem is the following: I need a type check in a module that is already imported by the module containing the class to check against. But this throws an import error. Like so: foo.py: from bar import Bar class Foo(object): def __init__(self): self.__bar = Bar(self) bar.py: from foo import Foo class Bar(object): def __init__(self, arg_instance_of_foo): if not isinstance(arg_instance_of_foo, Foo): raise TypeError() Solution 1: If I modified it to check the type by a string comparison, it will work. But I dont really like this solution (string comparsion is rather expensive for a simple type check, and could get a problem when it comes to refactoring). bar_modified.py: from foo import Foo class Bar(object): def __init__(self, arg_instance_of_foo): if not arg_instance_of_foo.__class__.__name__ == "Foo": raise TypeError() Solution 2: I could also pack the two classes into one module. But my project has lots of different classes like the "Bar" example, and I want to seperate them into different module files. After my own 2 solutions are no option for me: Has anyone a nicer solution for this problem?

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• Choosing a method for a webservice

  - by Wrikken

  I'm asked to set up a new webservice which should be easily usable in whatever language (php, .NET, Java, etc.) possible. Of course rolling my own can be done, accepting different content-types (xml / x-www-form-urlencoded (normal post) / json / etc.), but an existing method or mechanism would of course be prefered, cutting down time spent on development for the consumers of the service. The webservice does accept modifications / sets (it is not only simply data retrieval), but those will most likely be quite a lot less then gets (we estimate about 2.5% sets, 97.5 gets). The term webservice here indicates the protocol should go over HTTP, not being able to implement it totally client sided (javascript in the end-users browser etc.), as it needs specific user authentication. Both gets and sets are pretty light on the parameter count (usually 1 to 4). Methods like REST (which I'd prefer for only gets), XML-RPC & SOAP (might be a bit overkill, but has the advantage of explicitly defined methods and returns) are the usual suspects. What in your opinion / experience is the most widely 'spoken' and most easily implementable protocol in different languages (seen from the consumers' viewpoint) which could fullfill this need?

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• The Implications of Modern Day Software Development Abstractions

  - by Andreas Grech

  I am currently doing a dissertation about the implications or dangers that today's software development practices or teachings may have on the long term effects of programming. Just to make it clear: I am not attacking the use abstractions in programming. Every programmer knows that abstractions are the bases for modularity. What I want to investigate with this dissertation are the positive and negative effects abstractions can have in software development. As regards the positive, I am sure that I can find many sources that can confirm this. But what about the negative effects of abstractions? Do you have any stories to share that talk about when certain abstractions failed on you? The main concern is that many programmers today are programming against abstractions without having the faintest idea of what the abstraction is doing under-the-covers. This may very well lead to bugs and bad design. So, in you're opinion, how important is it that programmers actually know what is going below the abstractions? Taking a simple example from Joel's Back to Basics, C's strcat: void strcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); } The above function hosts the issue that if you are doing string concatenation, the function is always starting from the beginning of the dest pointer to find the null terminator character, whereas if you write the function as follows, you will return a pointer to where the concatenated string is, which in turn allows you to pass this new pointer to the concatenation function as the *dest parameter: char* mystrcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); return --dest; } Now this is obviously a very simple as regards abstractions, but it is the same concept I shall be investigating. Finally, what do you think about the issue that schools are preferring to teach Java instead of C and Lisp ? Can you please give your opinions and your says as regards this subject? Thank you for your time and I appreciate every comment.

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• One big executable or many small DLL's?

  - by Patrick

  Over the years my application has grown from 1MB to 25MB and I expect it to grow further to 40, 50 MB. I don't use DLL's, but put everything in this one big executable. Having one big executable has certain advantages: Installing my application at the customer is really: copy and run. Upgrades can be easily zipped and sent to the customer There is no risk of having conflicting DLL's (where the customer has version X of the EXE, but version Y of the DLL) The big disadvantage of the big EXE is that linking times seem to grow exponentially. Additional problem is that a part of the code (let's say about 40%) is shared with another application. Again, the advantages are that: There is no risk on having a mix of incorrect DLL versions Every developer can make changes on the common code which speeds up developments. But again, this has a serious impact on compilation times (everyone compiles the common code again on his PC) and on linking times. The question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2387908/grouping-dlls-for-use-in-executable mentions the possibility of mixing DLL's in one executable, but it looks like this still requires you to link all functions manually in your application (using LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress, ...). What is your opinion on executable sizes, the use of DLL's and the best 'balance' between easy deployment and easy/fast development?

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• Python, Ruby, and C#: Use cases?

  - by thaorius

  Hi everyone. For as long as I can remember, I've always had a "favorite" language, which I use for most projects, until, for some particular reason, there is no way/point on using it for project XYZ. At that point, I find myself rusty (and sometimes outdated) on other languages+libraries+toolchains. So I decided, I would just use some languages/libs/tools for some things, and some for other, effectively keeping them fresh (there would obviously be exceptions, I'm not looking for an arbitrary rule set, but some guidelines). I wanted an opinion on what would be your standard use cases (new projects) for Python, Ruby, and C# (Mono). At the moment, I have time like this:Languages: C#: Mid-Large Sized Projects (mainly server-side daemons) High Performance (I hardly ever need C's performance, but Python just doesn't cut it) Relatively Low Footprint (vs the JVM, for example) Ruby: Web Applications Python: General Use Scripts (automation, system config, etc) Small-Mid Sized Projects Prototyping Web Applications About Ruby, I have no idea what to use it for that I can't use Python for (specially considering Python is more easily found installed by default). And I like both languages (though I'm really new to Ruby), which makes things even worse. As for C#, I have not used a Windows powered computer in a few years, I don't make things for Windows computers, and I don't mind waiting for Mono to implement some new features. That being said, I haven't found many people on the internet using it for server-sided *nix programming (not web related). I would appreciate some insight on this too. Thanks for your time.

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• So many technologies to choose from. Where does the beginner start?

  - by Sahat

  WPF Silverlight Windows phone 7 w/ Silverlight iPhone OS w/ Objective-C Cocoa w/ Objective-C ASP.NET Android Facebook FBML HTML5 I will be graduating with B.S. in Computer Science soon and have to decide what do I want to learn from this list. I believe it's better to focus on one thing, master it and build up a portfolio to enhance my resume. Bachelor's Degree with no experience, no portfolio won't do me any good. It won't get me a job by itself. I need to have something that will greatly boost my resume. What would it be? iPhone development? ASP.NET web development? Facebook development? Or completely something else that I haven't listed? I understand it's natural for silverlight developers to say "Learn Silverlight", and iPhone developers say "Learn iPhone SDK and Objective-C". So please try to give a constructive, non-biased, non-objective opinion on which technology should I focus on. Please don't close the topic for "subjective/argumentative" reasons. I am just looking for some guidance.

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