Search Results

Search found 33509 results on 1341 pages for 'good practices'.

Page 85/1341 | < Previous Page | 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92  | Next Page >

• Handling close-to-impossible collisions on should-be-unique values

  - by balpha

  There are many systems that depend on the uniqueness of some particular value. Anything that uses GUIDs comes to mind (eg. the Windows registry or other databases), but also things that create a hash from an object to identify it and thus need this hash to be unique. A hash table usually doesn't mind if two objects have the same hash because the hashing is just used to break down the objects into categories, so that on lookup, not all objects in the table, but only those objects in the same category (bucket) have to be compared for identity to the searched object. Other implementations however (seem to) depend on the uniqueness. My example (that's what lead me to asking this) is Mercurial's revision IDs. An entry on the Mercurial mailing list correctly states The odds of the changeset hash colliding by accident in your first billion commits is basically zero. But we will notice if it happens. And you'll get to be famous as the guy who broke SHA1 by accident. But even the tiniest probability doesn't mean impossible. Now, I don't want an explanation of why it's totally okay to rely on the uniqueness (this has been discussed here for example). This is very clear to me. Rather, I'd like to know (maybe by means of examples from your own work): Are there any best practices as to covering these improbable cases anyway? Should they be ignored, because it's more likely that particularly strong solar winds lead to faulty hard disk reads? Should they at least be tested for, if only to fail with a "I give up, you have done the impossible" message to the user? Or should even these cases get handled gracefully? For me, especially the following are interesting, although they are somewhat touchy-feely: If you don't handle these cases, what do you do against gut feelings that don't listen to probabilities? If you do handle them, how do you justify this work (to yourself and others), considering there are more probable cases you don't handle, like a supernonva?

  Read the article

• Is it "right" to translate error messages?

  - by Iraklis

  This is somehow subjective depending on the target translation language, but bear with me for a sec. I have recently been involved in a translation project. The goal was to translate the strings of an MVC framework to the Greek language. 70% of the language strings of the framework where translated, however 30% where intentionally left out. The decision was that we will not translate error messages aimed towards the developer of the application. The reasoning behind this (in short) was: are aimed towards designers/programmers. Programmers ( and even designers :) ) should have a basic understanding of English, at least enough so they can search on it on Google if they do not know what it means. (racist?) are aimed towards the developer and in a perfect world should not be displayed to the end user of the application as they concern the inner workings of the web application itself. i.e "You must set the database name in your database config file." and perhaps most importantly, they make the life of the developer harder when he tries to get more information/help regarding the error. For example the above error yields 8 results in Google (in quotes), whereas its Greek translation yields exactly 0. I know that this depends on the popularity of the target translation language and the application itself. For example I'm guessing that there are is vast amount of documentation regarding German SAP error messages (i know, i know, SAP IS German, but you get the point), as opposed to Greek Error Messages documentation regarding random application X which has about 500 installations worldwide. So to summarize: When you develop language translation packs for your applications do you translate error messages? Do you only do for predominant languages like English/Spanish/German/French? Or do you live them intact? I'm not looking for the "right" or "correct" answer, I'm looking for a "best-practices" answer, or if this problem is defined in any "official" standard/policy that you have had experience with.

  Read the article

• When to use @Singleton in a Jersey resource

  - by dexter

  I have a Jersey resource that access the database. Basically it opens a database connection in the initialization of the resource. Performs queries on the resource's methods. I have observed that when I do not use @Singleton, the database is being open at each request. And we know opening a connection is really expensive right? So my question is, should I specify that the resource be singleton or is it really better to keep it at per request especially when the resource is connecting to the database? My resource code looks like this: //Use @Singleton here or not? @Path(/myservice/) public class MyResource { private ResponseGenerator responser; private Log logger = LogFactory.getLog(MyResource.class); public MyResource() { responser = new ResponseGenerator(); } @GET @Path("/clients") public String getClients() { logger.info("GETTING LIST OF CLIENTS"); return responser.returnClients(); } ... // some more methods ... } And I connect to the database using a code similar to this: public class ResponseGenerator { private Connection conn; private PreparedStatement prepStmt; private ResultSet rs; public ResponseGenerator(){ Class.forName("org.h2.Driver"); conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:h2:testdb"); } public String returnClients(){ String result; try{ prepStmt = conn.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM hosts"); rs = prepStmt.executeQuery(); ... //do some processing here ... } catch (SQLException se){ logger.warn("Some message"); } finally { rs.close(); prepStmt.close(); // should I also close the connection here (in every method) if I stick to per request // and add getting of connection at the start of every method // conn.close(); } return result } ... // some more methods ... } Some comments on best practices for the code will also be helpful.

  Read the article

• How to design authentication in a thick client, to be fail safe?

  - by Jay

  Here's a use case: I have a desktop application (built using Eclipse RCP) which on start, pops open a dialog box with 'UserName' and 'Password' fields in it. Once the end user, inputs his UserName and Password, a server is contacted (a spring remote-servlet, with the client side being a spring httpclient: similar to the approaches here.), and authentication is performed on the server side. A few questions related to the above mentioned scenario: If said this authentication service were to go down, what would be the best way to handle further proceedings? Authentication is something that I cannot do away with. Would running the desktop client in a "limited" mode be a good idea? For instance, important features/menus/views will be disabled, rest of the application will be accessible? Should I have a back up authentication service running on a different machine, working as a backup? What are the general best-practices in this scenario? I remember reading about google gears and how it would let you edit and do stuff offline - should something like this be designed? Please let me know your design/architectural comments/suggestions. Appreciate your help.

  Read the article

• C++ struct, public data members and inheritance

  - by Marius

  Is it ok to have public data members in a C++ class/struct in certain particular situations? How would that go along with inheritance? I've read opinions on the matter, some stated already here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952907/practices-on-when-to-implement-accessors-on-private-member-variables-rather-than http://stackoverflow.com/questions/670958/accessors-vs-public-members or in books/articles (Stroustrup, Meyers) but I'm still a little bit in the shade. I have some configuration blocks that I read from a file (integers, bools, floats) and I need to place them into a structure for later use. I don't want to expose these externally just use them inside another class (I actually do want to pass these config parameters to another class but don't want to expose them through a public API). The fact is that I have many such config parameters (15 or so) and writing getters and setters seems an unnecessary overhead. Also I have more than one configuration block and these are sharing some of the parameters. Making a struct with all the data members public and then subclassing does not feel right. What's the best way to tackle that situation? Does making a big struct to cover all parameters provide an acceptable compromise (I would have to leave some of these set to their default values for blocks that do not use them)?

  Read the article

• Organising files and classes in XCode (iPhone application)

  - by pulegium

  It's a generic question and really a newbie one too, so bear with me... I'm playing with some iPhone development, and trying to create a simple "flip type" application. Nothing sophisticated, let's say on the flip side is a short application summary, bit like 'help' and on the main screen is a simple board game, let's say tic-tac-toe or similar. Now, XCode has generated me 'Main View', 'Flipside View' and 'Application Delegate' folders, with default template files in them. Now the question is where do I create appropriate 'MVC' classes? Let's say (V)iew classes are going to be the ones that have been automatically created. So the Flipside view class is responsible for generating text/images etc on the 'help' view. 'Main View' class is what draws the items on the table and updates the counters, etc. Where should I place the 'controller' class? And also, should it only be dealing with proxying only to the model? According to this the controller method is called from the view and manipulates the method classes. Similarly, the results from model are passed back to the view class by the controller issuing the calls to appropriate view methods. Similarly, where does the model class go? or should I just create a new folder for each, controller and model class files? What I'm after is the best practices, or just a short description how people normally structure their applications. I know it's very specific and also undefined... I came from Django background, so the way stuff is organised there is slightly different. Hope this makes sense, sorry if it's all bit vague, but I have to start somewhere :) And yes I've read quite few docs on the apple developer site, but trouble is that the documents are either going into too much detail about the language/framework/etc and the examples are way too simplistic. Actually, this leads me to the final question, has anyone know any good example of relatively complete application tutorial which I could use as a reference in organising my files?...

  Read the article

• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project?

  Read the article

• Automatically Organize Tags in Tax/Folksonomy

  - by Rob Wilkerson

  I'm working on a process that will perform natural language processing (NLP) on one--and potentially several--of our content rich sites. What I'd like to do once the NLP is complete is to automatically organize the output (generally a set of terms that you might think of as tags given the prevalence of that metaphor) into some kind of standard or generally accepted organizational structure. In a perfect world, I'd really like this to be crowd sourced under the folksonomy concept (as opposed to a taxonomy) since the ultimate goal is to target/appeal to real people rather than "domain experts", but I'm open to ideas and best practices. For the obvious purpose of scalability, I'd like to automate the population of this tax/folksonomy so that "some guy" in the team/organization isn't responsible for looking at a bunch of words (with or without context) and arbitrarily fleshing out the contextual components of the tree. I have a few ideas for doing this that require some research to establish viability, but I have exactly zero practical experience with this sort of thing so the ideas really just boil down to stuff I made up that might perform some role in accomplishing the task. Imagining that others have vastly more experience with this sort of thing, I'm hoping that I can stand on your shoulders. Thanks for your thoughts and insights.

  Read the article

• Wicket: Where to add components? Constructor? Or onBeforeRender?

  - by gmallett

  I'm a Wicket newb. This may just be my ignorance of the Wicket lifecycle so please enlighten me! My understanding is that Wicket WebPage objects are instantiated once and then serialized. This has led to a point of confusion for me, see below. Currently I have a template class which I intend to subclass. I followed the example in the Wicket docs demonstrating how to override the template's behavior in the subclass: protected void onBeforeRender() { add(new Label("title", getTitle())); super.onBeforeRender(); } protected String getTitle() { return "template"; } Subclass: protected String getTitle() { return "Home"; } This works very well. What's not clear to me are the "best practices" for this. It seems like onBeforeRender() is called on every request for the page, no? This seems like there would be substantially more processing done on a page if everything is in onBeforeRender(). I could easily follow the example of the other Wicket examples and add some components in the constructor that I do not want to override, but then I've divided by component logic into two places, something I'm hesitant to do. If I add a component that I intend to be in all subclasses, should I add it to the constructor or onBeforeRender()?

  Read the article

• Console Application Structure

  - by Paul Fox

  I've written several .Net Console Applications over the past 6 months and we have many more throughout different projects in our organization. I generally stick to the same standard format/structure for my Console Applications. Unfortunately, many of our console applications do not. I have been looking into ways of standardizing the structure of these Console Applications. I would also like to provide a framework for the basic structure of a Console Application and provide easy access to standard ways of handling things such as argument passing, logging, etc. Can anyone suggest Best Practices for addressing these concerns? I have been reading this MSDN article on Console Applications in .Net which suggests a Design Pattern for Console Apps. The example uses a Template Method pattern to handle some of the concerns I listed earlier. Two negatives of using this approach are listed in the article. Ending up with twice as many classes Having many simple, similar classes Can anyone suggest better, or more standard, ways of handling this? What about listing additional negatives with this approach?

  Read the article

• Why use shorter VARCHAR(n) fields?

  - by chryss

  It is frequently advised to choose database field sizes to be as narrow as possible. I am wondering to what degree this applies to SQL Server 2005 VARCHAR columns: Storing 10-letter English words in a VARCHAR(255) field will not take up more storage than in a VARCHAR(10) field. Are there other reasons to restrict the size of VARCHAR fields to stick as closely as possible to the size of the data? I'm thinking of Performance: Is there an advantage to using a smaller n when selecting, filtering and sorting on the data? Memory, including on the application side (C++)? Style/validation: How important do you consider restricting colunm size to force non-sensical data imports to fail (such as 200-character surnames)? Anything else? Background: I help data integrators with the design of data flows into a database-backed system. They have to use an API that restricts their choice of data types. For character data, only VARCHAR(n) with n <= 255 is available; CHAR, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and TEXT are not. We're trying to lay down some "good practices" rules, and the question has come up if there is a real detriment to using VARCHAR(255) even for data where real maximum sizes will never exceed 30 bytes or so. Typical data volumes for one table are 1-10 Mio records with up to 150 attributes. Query performance (SELECT, with frequently extensive WHERE clauses) and application-side retrieval performance are paramount.

  Read the article

• How does an ASP.NET programmer go from working on/developing existing sites, to creating one from sc

  - by SLC

  I've been an ASP.NET developer for some time, always working on existing ASP.NET pages, modifying functionality, adding features, tweaking things etc. but have never built a site up from scratch. I've read books on ASP.NET, and they generally talk you through the various features of ASP.NET with a mock up site, but it's always very basic and they jump straight in. The time has come however, to write a site from scratch for a client. I've never done this before. There are design considerations, but like a lot of ASP.NET sites, the basic idea is, you have a site, where users can log in, and save some information like their name and password and address. The site has some functionality, but that's the basic design of a majority of (business-related) asp.net websites I would wager. I know how to program in ASP.NET already on an existing site, but I don't know how to design my own properly that meets the criteria above. I guess the main worry is security. I don't know the best way to handle a simple log-in system that stores user information like their name and password. I understand there are a few approaches to this, but the catch with this project is that it has to be absolutely bulletproof. Maximum security. All those good practices for security, it needs to have them all. I'm not asking what they are, but I am asking where to begin. What should be the first steps after I do File New Project ? Where can I look for information about setting up a secure ASP.NET website? I'll figure out the content and page layout later, it's the framework that is the big thing. Any and all advice would be welcome. I really want to get my first from-scratch project right from the beginning. Just to confuse things, it's possible I will be using MVC, I am not sure if this has any impact.

  Read the article

• Dealing with large number of text strings

  - by Fadrian

  My project when it is running, will collect a large number of string text block (about 20K and largest I have seen is about 200K of them) in short span of time and store them in a relational database. Each of the string text is relatively small and the average would be about 15 short lines (about 300 characters). The current implementation is in C# (VS2008), .NET 3.5 and backend DBMS is Ms. SQL Server 2005 Performance and storage are both important concern of the project, but the priority will be performance first, then storage. I am looking for answers to these: Should I compress the text before storing them in DB? or let SQL Server worry about compacting the storage? Do you know what will be the best compression algorithm/library to use for this context that gives me the best performance? Currently I just use the standard GZip in .NET framework Do you know any best practices to deal with this? I welcome outside the box suggestions as long as it is implementable in .NET framework? (it is a big project and this requirements is only a small part of it) EDITED: I will keep adding to this to clarify points raised I don't need text indexing or searching on these text. I just need to be able to retrieve them in later stage for display as a text block using its primary key. I have a working solution implemented as above and SQL Server has no issue at all handling it. This program will run quite often and need to work with large data context so you can imagine the size will grow very rapidly hence every optimization I can do will help.

  Read the article

• SQL Server: Why use shorter VARCHAR(n) fields?

  - by chryss

  It is frequently advised to choose database field sizes to be as narrow as possible. I am wondering to what degree this applies to SQL Server 2005 VARCHAR columns: Storing 10-letter English words in a VARCHAR(255) field will not take up more storage than in a VARCHAR(10) field. Are there other reasons to restrict the size of VARCHAR fields to stick as closely as possible to the size of the data? I'm thinking of Performance: Is there an advantage to using a smaller n when selecting, filtering and sorting on the data? Memory, including on the application side (C++)? Style/validation: How important do you consider restricting colunm size to force non-sensical data imports to fail (such as 200-character surnames)? Anything else? Background: I help data integrators with the design of data flows into a database-backed system. They have to use an API that restricts their choice of data types. For character data, only VARCHAR(n) with n <= 255 is available; CHAR, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and TEXT are not. We're trying to lay down some "good practices" rules, and the question has come up if there is a real detriment to using VARCHAR(255) even for data where real maximum sizes will never exceed 30 bytes or so. Typical data volumes for one table are 1-10 Mio records with up to 150 attributes. Query performance (SELECT, with frequently extensive WHERE clauses) and application-side retrieval performance are paramount.

  Read the article

• What can tables do that CSS positioning cannot?

  - by Jeremy Lew

  I know there are various good arguments preferring css positioning over table-based layouts. What I'm wondering is whether the CSS model is complete (assuming a relatively modern browser) with respect to ALL of the capabilities of tables. Are there layouts that tables can achieve that are impossible or impractical with CSS?

  Read the article

• Best Practice for Images with Codeigniter : Generating Thumbs or Resizing on the Fly

  - by Steve K

  Hi all, I know there’s been a good deal written on thumbnail generation and the like with CI, but I wanted to explain what I’ve made and see what kind of best-practice advice I could find. Here’s my story… Currently, I have a site which allows users to upload collections of photos to projects they’ve created after first creating an account. Upon account creation, the site generates folders for the users in the following fashion for each of five pre-defined projects: /students/username/project_num/images/thumbs/ (This is to say that within a pre-created students folder, the username, project_num, images and thumbs folders are created recursively five times.) When a user uploads images to a project, I have a gallery controller which uploads the full images into the images folder for the project_num, and then creates a smaller thumbnail which maintains its ratio. So far so good. On the index page of the site, where these thumbnails and full images are displayed, I had a bit of a brain lapse, thinking I could simply output the full image while resizing it via css for a ‘medium-size’ image which would lead to the full-size image when clicked. (To be clear, the path is: Click on thumbnail— Load scaled full-size (medium-size) image via ajax into a display area above thumbs— Click on medium-sized image— Load full size image via lightbox, or something of that nature.) I have everything working to this point, except, as one might imagine, resizing the full-sized images with css doesn’t maintain aspect ratio for the thumbs, which means I need to find the best way to resize these. In thinking about it, I figured I had two options: I could resize the image on the fly when the user clicks a thumbnail to load the medium-sized image via ajax. (I have a method ‘get_image($url)’ in my gallery controller which simply loads a view with an image tag and the image source passed to it, etc.) I thought perhaps I could send it first to my gallery model, resize it there on the fly, and send it on to the view. The problem I’m having is that resizing it on the fly and echoing it out gives me the raw image data (I apologize, I don’t know that’s the right term). I’ve tried using data_uris to format the raw data into something echoable, but with no success. Is this method possible? The second option I considered was to generate a second medium-sized thumbnail when the user uploads the image with maintain_ratio set to true. This method is slightly less ideal, given that when providing a way for the user to delete their projects, I’ll need to scan for an additional set of images to delete. Not a huge deal, definitely, but something I figured could be avoided by generating the medium-sized image on the fly. I hope I’ve been clear in my explanations, if long-winded! I’m very curious to see what suggestions folks have about the best way to handle this. Much thanks for reading, and any suggestions are much-appreciated! Steve K.

  Read the article

• WiX tricks and tips

  - by Si

  We've been using WiX 3 for a while now, and despite the usual gripes about ease of use, it's going reasonably well. What I'm looking for is useful advice regarding: Setting up a WiX project (layout, references, file patterns) Integrating WiX into solutions, and build/release processes Configuring installers for new installations and upgrades Also interested in any good WiX hacks you'd like to share, thanks!

  Read the article

• General advice and guidelines on how to properly override object.GetHashCode()

  - by Svish

  According to MSDN, a hash function must have the following properties: If two objects compare as equal, the GetHashCode method for each object must return the same value. However, if two objects do not compare as equal, the GetHashCode methods for the two object do not have to return different values. The GetHashCode method for an object must consistently return the same hash code as long as there is no modification to the object state that determines the return value of the object's Equals method. Note that this is true only for the current execution of an application, and that a different hash code can be returned if the application is run again. For the best performance, a hash function must generate a random distribution for all input. I keep finding myself in the following scenario: I have created a class, implemented IEquatable<T> and overridden object.Equals(object). MSDN states that: Types that override Equals must also override GetHashCode ; otherwise, Hashtable might not work correctly. And then it usually stops up a bit for me. Because, how do you properly override object.GetHashCode()? Never really know where to start, and it seems to be a lot of pitfalls. Here at StackOverflow, there are quite a few questions related to GetHashCode overriding, but most of them seems to be on quite particular cases and specific issues. So, therefore I would like to get a good compilation here. An overview with general advice and guidelines. What to do, what not to do, common pitfalls, where to start, etc. I would like it to be especially directed at C#, but I would think it will work kind of the same way for other .NET languages as well(?). I think maybe the best way is to create one answer per topic with a quick and short answer first (close to one-liner if at all possible), then maybe some more information and end with related questions, discussions, blog posts, etc., if there are any. I can then create one post as the accepted answer (to get it on top) with just a "table of contents". Try to keep it short and concise. And don't just link to other questions and blog posts. Try to take the essence of them and then rather link to source (especially since the source could disappear. Also, please try to edit and improve answers instead of created lots of very similar ones. I am not a very good technical writer, but I will at least try to format answers so they look alike, create the table of contents, etc. I will also try to search up some of the related questions here at SO that answers parts of these and maybe pull out the essence of the ones I can manage. But since I am not very stable on this topic, I will try to stay away for the most part :p

  Read the article

• Utility method - Pass a File or String?

  - by James P.

  Here's an example of a utility method: public static Long getFileSize(String fileString) { File file = new File(fileString); if (file == null || !file.isFile()) return null; return file.length(); } Is it a good practise to pass a String rather than a File to a method like this? In general what reasoning should be applied when making utility methods of this style?

  Read the article

• ORM market analysis

  - by bonefisher

  I would like to see your experience with popular ORM tools outhere, like NHibernate, LLBLGen, EF, S2Q, Genom-e, LightSpeed, DataObjects.NET, OpenAccess, ... From my exp: - Genom-e is quiet capable of Linq & performance, dev support - EF lacks on some key features like lazy loading, Poco support, pers.ignorance... but in 4.o it may have overcome .. - DataObjects.Net so far good, althrough I found some bugs - NHibernate steep learning curve, no 100% Linq support (like in Genom-e and DataObjects.Net), but very supportive, extensible and mature

  Read the article

• Can a script called by XHR reference $_COOKIE?

  - by Christian Mann

  Quick yes/no - I'm building an AJAX application and some scripts require authentication. Can I read $_COOKIE['username'] and $_COOKIE['password'] on the server if the PHP script was called via XHR, whether that be $.get() or $.post()? Side question: Can it also set cookies? Is that considered "good practice"?

  Read the article

• How long do you keep log files?

  - by Alex

  I have an application which writes its log files in a special folder. Now I'd like to add a functionality to delete these logs after a defined period of time automatically. But how long should I keep the log files? What are "good" default values (7 or 180 days)? Or do you prefer other criteria (e.g. max. used disk space)?

  Read the article

• html & javascript: How to store data referring to html elements

  - by Dan

  Hello, I'm working on a web application that uses ajax to communicate to the server. My specific situation is the following: I have a list of users lined out in the html page. On each of these users i can do the following: change their 'status' or 'remove' them from the account. What's a good practice for storing information in the page about the following: the user id the current status of the user P.S.: I'm using jQuery.

  Read the article

• Is gratuitous use of 'var' keyword considered harmful?

  - by spender

  I use it almost all the time unless I'm not assigning to the variable immediately, in which case it's not an option. Good or bad?

  Read the article

• What is your "favorite" anti pattern?

  - by Omar Kooheji

  By favorite I mean the one that gets your goat the most, not the one you enjoy using the most. I'm fairly new to the concept of anti patterns and I'd like a list of do not do's. An explanation of why it's an antipattern and what problems it causes would be good too.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92  | Next Page >