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In many langauges, super() lets you call the parent method which you have overridden. I've been using super in my Javascript (with fake object oriented implementation) to run common code for a long time without problems. Now I've finally hit a case where calling a protected base class method would have been better than...
My customer recently discovered what is URL Rewriting, without completely understanding what it is, how it works and the pros and cons of it. Now, he asks for lots of strange changes in actual requirements of current projects and changes in old projects in order to implement what he believes is URL Rewriting. On one ha...
I'm still at Microsoft TechEd, and the response to my question about how to effectively use my time at software conferences was overwhelmingly "networking is the most useful part of software conferences". Problem: I have no idea how to even approach that task. I've always been kind of an introvert. At school and at wor...
I have three incoming projects that share a common problem: they need to have the logic on a web system and they need a local application (e.g. point of sale) that communicates with such system through a RESTful web service. My Solution The solution I managed to come up with is to implement in the desktop application...
Data persistency has recently become a really grip for me, especially how long to maintain database connectivity and how many connections are feasible for a given request. I've been using .NET; however, this is a generic question related to any lanaguage. From a .NET perspective, I'm connecting to database using EF4 an...
I work on Debian and before Debian I was on Ubuntu. In my previous job, we simply ignored IE6, but at my present job a page must work flawlessly for IE6 onwards. The one wayout for me is to set up a Windows VM but that doesn't help every time. Consider this, if I was a freelance consultant and didn't want to or have en...
I've been thinking about this problem recently and it really doesn't seem like it's possible, but I figured that I'd ask just in case. Assume a simple program, in pseudocode: run hash on an executable we think is mimicing the true executable check the value against the hash that's hard coded into this executable if it ...
I want to gather some arguments as to why letting a developer testing his/her own work as the last step before the product goes into production is a bad idea, because unfortunately, my place of work sometimes does this (the last time this came up, the argument boiled down to most people being too busy with other things...
I heard about a tool named FitNesse, which is supposed to promote better collaboration between development, testing, and product groups. What are your experiences with it? Does it really improve program quality? Are there any drawbacks to using it?
I am reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" . The book has the following paragraph Dave once worked on an international telex switch. Quite understandably, the client demanded an exhaustive test specification and required that the software pass all tests on each delivery. To ensure that the tests accurately...
I am about to take plunge into PHP frameworks and my weapon of choice is kohona. I have a reasonable amount of OO experince with java. And my javaScript, jQuery, PhP and html/CSS skills are passable. Now to the question. Is this a reasonable choice? As ZEND looks like a steeper learning curve and CakePHP commandline c...
I was thinking about this for quite some time. Is function memoization really only for primitives? I currently have this piece of code: Public Shared Function Mize(Of TArg1 As Structure, TResult)(ByVal input_f As System.Func(Of TArg1, TResult)) As System.Func(Of TArg1, TResult) Dim map = New System.Collections.Gene...
At most of my corporate clients they have very complex systems with multiple entities to be deployed and tested. (e.g. client software, user database, system, database, identity manager application, etc). They usually don't have an easy way to deploy all this. Neither in production nor for development. I wonder how ope...
I saw a job opening where the requirement was for a developer to develop CAD tools using C++ and OpenGl libraries. I am a civil engineer and want to be part of such a projects so I thought to learn C++ and some libraries which could help me to move forward for such job opportunities. I know a bit of C++ but I am quite...
We are currently using an old legacy ERP system (Thoroughbred) that we have been bolting on functionality by means of web apps we design in house. I interact with the legacy system via ODBC and have to pay on a per connection base via Licenses. I would like to build in intermediate system that would take the sql reques...
I would be interested to get the SO community's opinions on the best application versioning strategy. My questions: How do you keep track of your application's version number? Do you have a formal definition of what each number/character in that version represents? What do the different numbers/strings in the applicat...
We all get them. What do you do when you are supposed to write a functional spec from a woolly proposal? You can write a ton of questions about the proposal but answers are not always forthcoming. Sometimes for political reasons you cannot make someone firm them up. How do you deal with a vague software proposal, when ...
For the 4 jobs that I have worked at, I dressed formal twice, business casual once and more casual once. How important is the dressing code to programming interviews these days? Will the employer or interviewer not take you seriously if you come in casually: plain shirt and khaki pants with casual walking shoes(non-s...
I'm planning to provide a little service with which you can control your computer from anywere. It exists out of a server (which I will be providing), and two clients (a controlled one and a controlling one). Now I want to provide that service for a little fee. However, the server is actually a small old Dell laptop wi...
Usually I just throw my unit tests together using copy and paste and all kind of other bad practices. The unit tests usually end up looking quite ugly, they're full of "code smell," but does this really matter? I always tell myself as long as the "real" code is "good" that's all that matters. Plus, unit testing usua...
I am trying to understand dealing with immutable data in FP (specifically in F#, but other FP’s are ok as well) and break the old habit of state-full thinking (OOP style). A part of the selected answer to the question here reiterated my search for any write-ups around problems that are solved by stateful representation...
I would like to know with the restrictions of GAE listed below, is it even possible to build a great social app (like Facebook) by hosting that app on GAE? In other words is GAE an infrastructure capable of hosting an app used by 600 million active users? Restrictions I've dugged out from a couple of forums / blogs (pl...
I'm creating a simple "find one of our locations" app for iOS 4, for which I have a list of >70 places, complete with addresses, business hours, etc. Is it better to put all of this data in one large plist or many small ones?
Awhile back I discussed the possibility of moving to a startup that is going to be using Java, more specifically the Play! Framework; well, I'm going to go for it! I have been a .NET guy for a long time now and haven't really been in the Java game except for the occasional Android tinkering or messing around with Scala...
The library that I'm working on has a parameter which defines priority of a certain process. I want the interface to be as clear as possible, but it seems that different people have opposite interpretations of priority values. 1. Lowest number has highest priority (1 - highest priority, 10 - lowest priority) 2. Highest...
Now that I've done a few trivial things with Scala (which I love for "hello world" and contrived applications!) I am left wondering.. part about maturity of the tools to support development, and part about general applicability. Are the toolsets ready? Is Scala appropriate for use on enterprise / business application...
I find myself talking about computers with a lot of non-tech people, who often use the word "glitch" to describe an undesirable outcome of a program or operating system(of course, never Linux!). I have never heard another programmer use the word "glitch" and hearing it makes me think the user has no idea what they are...
I heard about 3D canvas. It's strange for me. Because I know there's already a industrial standard 3D API WebGL. What's that? How is it different with WebGL?
I often find myself in situations where objects need to communicate between each other. For example, a button might need to talk to various textboxes. Would it be proper to simply construct each widget with a pointer to the container for all of them? Would it be better to give it a pointer to a resource container map w...
For a programmer/cs student that wishes to dive into web development and freelancing... what are some good books/publications/portals/blogs? Please take into consideration also that I'm used to developing websites by googling my each step to find an example. I'm interested in technologies like php, javascript, jquery, ...
This is a little vague. But I've tried to put the things to the point. As much as the handhelds (smartphones, tablets) are becoming extremely popular every passing day, What I wonder is, why there are no great programming tools for them? With great processing power of these devices, I don't think there's any problem in...
I'm creating a website for a friend of mine, and the plan is to eventually solicit outside sources to take care of the overall design. So it's got me wondering, how much design should I be covering now? I'm primarily driven to just code the logic for the website and get everything functional before I care too much ab...
I found the "Extension method" concept of C# just wonderful. It enables us to do things like: More flexible alternative to Abstract Classes. Provide missing Java-like functionalities to C# enum. And The coolest thing about it IMHO is that adding a method doesn't break backward compatibility. However, I found almost n...
I'm reading Ralph Kimball's books and I'm currently exploring the following data warehouse schema. Are both dimension & fact tables populated during the data warehouse creation/update? How often? What about the DimDate table? Do we populate it with all possible dates or only with date used by facts tables? What is the...
this page http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html writes: although Go has static types the language attempts to make types feel lighter weight than in typical OO languages So my question is exactly is it safely typed with generics (like C#) or loosely typed (like javascript) or optional (like option strict in Vb.Net...
I am developing a small web application in CakePHP which allows user to create contents using tools I provide. Once user is done creating the contents, I want to give an option to embed that in her own website. There are 2 ways I can think of right now to do this Using iFrame embed code Giving unique link to that con...
Our client has a CRM application (let's call it A) and a custom built Windows application (VB.NET) (let's call it B) that directly writes to and reads from the CRM database. Application A is used (mainly) to manage clients and their orders. Application B is used to manage all the products our client sells. Our client w...
Many of you out there work for large companies that ship well-known software. I was wondering, how much of original code (basically, code that was "v1.0" release) is left in modern massive applications, such as, say, Firefox, Photoshop, Windows, Linux, etc? I'd really prefer first-hand experience and real-world war sto...
I need some advice on collaborative software environments. More specifically, I am looking for books and reference materials that can aid me in understanding team and code structures and the interactions thereof. In other words books, blogs or white papers explaining: Different strategies for structuring teams that s...
as GWT is supposed to abstract all the browsers implementations (for widgets, etc) is it worth doing cross-browser testing? I was just thinking to test only the styling related stuff (CSS related) in different browsers. Any opinion on that?
I just started a new job a couple months ago at a small company where I am currently leading all development efforts present and future. I personally have years of experience in software design and development from mostly Java but also a .NET perspective. I picked up .NET later in my career with great ease and requir...
I just read Flinging Fish for Fun and Profit, a short little essay on how Pike Place Market in Seattle turned to dwindling business into a success by making it fun. Obviously having fun at work is largely attitude, but I'm wondering what practical things can be done to have more fun with programming and related tasks? ...
At my current job (we're in a MS environment), we have multiple deployed web applications, both inter/intra net. The internal apps generally use an Active Diretory sign in, the forward facing sites each have their own membership implementation. Some use a custom provider we wrote, some use Asp.Net membership. Yes, we h...
I name my variables using the .Net conventions: camelCase for variables and fields (I tend to use _camelCase for private fields in a class) PascalCase for methods, properties and classes The only place I deviate is on constants and Enums where I actually prefer the Java SCREAMING_CAPS style. My company's codebase is ...
Stack Overflow has an awesome set of badges that recognizes a persons contribution to the community and allows an individual's capabilities to grow the more he contributes. What techniques can I use for open-source or coding projects? For example, a person's contribution to the code base earns them badges along with e...
I need to extract very particular data from log files(of different types and formats). Since I am a recent college passout; my mind ran to using Lex and Yacc for the purpose. Now I have the following Questions 1. Will it be legal to do so ? (This product I am working for belongs to one of the biggest tech companies in...
It's stable and has a time complexity of O(n). It should be faster than algorithms like Quicksort and Mergesort, yet I hardly ever see it used.
A co-worker and myself are having a debate on whats best. Both concepts work and work well but is there a general consensus on not making a call to exit? Whats better? To call exit within a procedure to avoid doing the rest of the code as in ... if Staging.Current = nil then exit DoSomethingA(FileNameA); DoSometh...
My ideal programming language would let me define a custom css that would lay out code according to my specifications of columns/space/brackets placement etc. and check in only content. Everybody gets their own layouts - and hence we avoid all the long winded discussions about styles. A language that could do refactori...
I'm just about done writing an iPhone application and submit it to the App Store for approval. I'm going to sell the app for a price, but I'd like to be able to give out a few free copies on occasion, kind of like a promotional offer. I know when you go to one particular coffee establishment, they have gift cards avail...
Possible Duplicate: How many developers before continuous integration becomes effective? When does continuous integration (such as CruiseControl) add value to a project? Do factors such as Number of Unit Tests How often changes are made Branch development Team Size make a difference in the value added by continuou...
I've seen a lot of information on best practices for dealing with lost password on websites, but what about usernames? Is there a standard way of dealing with this? My basic idea is to ask for the users email and send the username to that email. I'm wondering if something more secure along the lines of password recove...
What is the best practice and software you use to document change related document. lso, how you prefer to document the changes in the project. Let say, you got a requirement to make some changes in the project. How do you proceed? Do you take the complete backup before processing. Will this backup be documented. If ...
I have been programming python and web apps awhile now but never delved very deep into OOP. I use classes all the time but I am pretty sure i am not fully getting what I could get from OOP. So today I popped open Learn Python (mark lutz) which i had read awhile ago, flipped through the oop section in about 5 minutes an...
Possible Duplicate: What “version naming convention” do you use? I am currently debating between the traditional versioning convention [major].[minor].[revision] and my own, almost whimsical, [YYYY].[MM].[DD].[hh][mm] for a new project I am starting. I understand that [major].[minor].[revision] is probably the most ...
So I started working for a large corp., one of those with 3 letters in the name, and they are trying to become Agile, but have tons of processes, which I don't feel are Agile. The one that has me the most wound up are code reviews. My last job was with a startup that I would say is the most Agile development team I ha...
Previously, I wanted to learn Python quickly: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/49755/resource-to-start-with-python-quickly and I was quite successful (enough to write a simplified LISP interpreter). Now I need to learn JavaScript for some web programming using Prototype and Scriptaculous with Ru...
So I've got a solution that contains a few big projects, which I'm trying to break down into smaller projects with more isolated responsibilities. This is a game I'm tinkering with -- I'm mainly a LOB developer and I think the principles are universal, so I'm hoping to learn something here. The dependencies in some of ...
I've had a few software ideas before that could probably be patented.(decided not to pursue any of them, however). Basically, I don't want these ideas patented though. I don't care if someone else implements them, I just don't want to get sued later by some patent troll who patented the idea I had and implemented 5 yea...
For example, is it better to do: Pdf pdf = new Pdf(); pdf.Print(); or: Pdf pdf = new Pdf(); PdfPrinter printer = new PdfPrinter(); printer.Print(pdf); Another example: Country m = new Country("Mexico"); double ratio = m.GetDebtToGDPRatio(); or: Country m = new Country("Mexico"); Country us = new Country("US"); DebtS...
We have some pretty old, clunky .Net 1.1 apps in our business that - rather than be forcably upgraded - just get an iFrame added so that new functions can be dropped in. It's become such a well-known option that many management staff who don't really have a great deal of technical knowledge or experience suggest just t...
Recently I found one of my Maven project have 100+ jar dependencies. FWIK a zip archive doesn't have index at all, so it should scan the whole zip to determine if it contains a specific path. But I found Java resolve class names against so many jars rather fast, why?
FWIK Java can run on 64-bit system, no problem. I'd like to know how Java support 64-bit features, e.g., System.identityHashCode() returns a 32-bit int, it's common to see the object pointer (memory address) is returned. Should 64-bit Java returns long instead? If not, how would Java scale to 64-bit systems?
Technically, Is there a difference between these two words or can we use them interchangeably? Both of them more or less describe the logical sequence of steps that follow in solving a problem. ain't it? SO why do we actually use two such words if they are meant to talk of the same? Or, In case if they aren't synonymou...
I thought Unicode was designed to get around the whole issue of having lots of different encoding due to a small address space (8 bits) in most of the prior attempts (ASCII, etc.). Why then are there so many Unicode encodings? Even multiple versions of the (essentially) same one, like UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.
Highly related https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6021938/nodejs-many-clients-requests-through-one-socket I'm investigating a robust message passing system for this application of mine. The easyest solution would be Redis pub/sub (it's simple, effective and I'd also use Redis for caching) but as I understand it, pub...
I'v been working on sorting for a while now but I can't figure these two questions apart, I'm kind of getting mixed up somewhere ... Somebody help a) Which sorting algorithms have a different worst case complexity than their average case? b) Which sorting algorithms have a different best case complexity than their av...
Do you have any kind of update process? Let's assume you are an "in-house" development shop for php inside your company. You are creating an bunch of applications for other units. Do you have something like "Support ends in 2 years" ? What happens if you develop an app for php 5.3, and this app can't run with php "6",...
I may be violating some StackOverflow terms by asking a question which is more likely to yield discussion than a clean answer. Here goes, however. I've developed some software for a small company that isn't a software house (so we don't already have a lot of processes in place). It is in Turbo Pascal (Delphi 2009) an...
We have a large (1200+ hours) website that has a lot of technical debt. This is mainly caused by the following (usual) reasons. Multiple programmers who come and go during development. Change of specifications during development. Numerous added functionalities added (in a short time). The customer wants alot of new f...
Just finished merging seven scripts into one, but got me thinking that I really don't have a formal logic for breaking scripts into pages, or why I'd merge them. Suggestions?
I was deciding whether to start a Windows Phone application, but it seems like it might be better to wait until Mango is released. Is Mango a new platform, or is it an upgrade to Windows Phone 7 (i.e. Windows Phone 8)? Is it expected to arrive in the near future? That is, should a project starting today worry about it?...
I am totally into Scala as a language ... and still I struggle with why any company should switch from Java to Scala. Is Scala just syntatic sugar on top of the JVM or are there fundamental improvements in Scala over Java that would improve real world applications?
I have never been very clear on this concept. Please help: At the end of the day, we should want to identify useful problems for which we don't have polynomial solution so far and only have exponential solutions.We want to keep finding if we can find a polynomial solution to these problems and the use of reductions is ...
I have been working for 5 years at the same company now. I want to go and find a new job. Finding jobs or getting interview calls has been difficult, there are have far and few. And to compound the problem I need work permit(H1b) to work. My question is how do network with other programmers and increase my chances of g...
During my first implementation extending the Java collection framework, I was quite surprised to see that the collection interface contains methods declared as optional. The implementer is expected to throw UnsupportedOperationExceptions if unsupported. This immediately struck me as a poor API design choice. After re...
I have read and used many good Linq to . I have also read that some of the Linq to __ are not worth learning as there are better techniques. I was just wondering which of the bunch should I concentrate on and which have more suitable alternatives. Thanks
Background: I am thinking of trying to introduce the concept of unit tests to my co-workers by creating some for a module I have been working on; the requirements of it recently changed and require some more abstractions/interactions so it seems like a good way to develop a suite of tests that will "prove" it works wit...
After reading Jeff Atwood's article "Working with the Chaos Monkey" and considering the implications of "Fallacies of Distributed Computing" it made me wonder if the first task of developers creating a cloud-based application should be to create a Chaos Monkey. Actually, given that even an entire data center can be los...
I'm just starting as a Scrum Master, and I am looking for a good web based tool for a story board. I am trying Agilefant, and they have something called "leaf stories". I wonder what do they mean by that. I've read about User Stories, Technical Stories, Unplanned Items, but I can't seem to find a reference to "Leaf St...
I am designing a high volume web service which will rely on a central database containing objects of a single JSON type. Currently I am considering using ChunkDB to store the objects and retrieve the objects using views (RESTful API). Some of the views may be complex. The amount of data stored in the database will be l...
The title might seem to be inflammatory, but it's here to catch your eye after all. I'm a professional .NET developer, but I try to follow other platforms as well. With Ruby being all hyped up (mostly due to Rails, I guess) I cannot help but compare the situation in open-source projects in Ruby and .NET. What I persona...
How necessary is it for testers to do white-box testing in addition to black-box testing? As a developer, I see value in having a QA-minded person go through my code and look for weak points, but it also seems like if a non-technical tester is thorough and methodical enough, they can cover the application well. White ...
Currently I have been asked to propose an automated release management solution for a large oracle SOA project. All code is stored on SVN repository and it would be nice if I could suggest something that would build, deploy, run test cases and produced reports for all projects on trunk. I know that I could do that by c...
A company with a solid open source project competing against a traditional closed-source product seems impossible to beat. I read this article wherein the author lays out this scenario: Suppose one could divide a software market—say network management—between two products. One did everything possible and cost $1...
I'm in a bit of a precarious position. I'm working remotely for a client that has recently brought in a junior developer straight out of college into the project. He works physically at their office. I believe he studied computer science (although I can't recall 100% at the moment). He has been with the company a coup...
I read that the definition of NP-complete is : These are the hardest problems in NP. Such a problem is NP-hard and in NP How do we know if a problem is hardest in NP, and no harder problem exists. I understand that let's assume that somehow magically we know that a problem L is hardest in NP and then we can find o...
I have a simple encryption/decryption application that I am testing to learn more about security. I found out that if the user modifies the encrypted file, then decryption fails because the hashing algorithm doesn't generate back the original content. What are the common practices that deal with the problem of encrypte...
I'm in the middle of writing a CSS parser in C#. I'm well under way, but I also have those times where I wonder if I'm taking the best approach. The things I've considered are: Feed the CSS grammar from the W3C into a parser generator and working off that. Hand-code a CSS parser off the grammar. Use a generated tokeni...
If I know correctly, subset sum problem is NP-complete. Here you have an array of n integers and you are given a target sum t, you have to return the numbers from the array which can sum up to the target (if possible). But can't this problem be solved in polynomial time by dynamic programming method where we construct ...
Possible Duplicate: how to really master a programming language Let say about Java(just a sample, you can talk about C#, PHP, C++ ... it's just similar) and 10 (ten) levels, 1 is newbie and 10 is master. How can you identify someone at which level based on his knowledge? I do not tend to compare languages, I do tend...
I had a chance to have an interesting conversation with my co-workers. Most of them are flash action script or Java developers. We talked about how well php handles OOP. I said that PHP can handle almost every OOP stuff as of PHP 5.2 or 5.3. Am I wrong? I'm not trying to get yes/no answer, but I would like to hear more...
If experienced programmers actually ever use debuggers, and if so under what circumstances. Although in the answer to that question I said "months" ago I probably meant "years" - I really don't use a debugger. So my specific answerable question is under which circumstances would you, as an experienced programmer, use a...
As an avid fan of tablets, I finally bought a Nook Color a while back. Since it's based on Android and I have Java experience, I'm intrigued by the possibility of developing for it. I've seen that it has an estimate of a few million units shipped (those stats were fairly recent), and the app market is rather small at...
One type of question that keeps coming up on Programmers.SE is how to learn a specific language, given you know several others (usually through a lot of experience or education). In some cases, however, one might need to get up to speed quickly for a job, or for personal development, or even to check out a hot new plat...
On 26 May 2011, a new EU directive comes into force that users accessing websites should now be asked for permission to allow the website to store cookies containing information about them and their visit to the website. How have you have tackled this issue? Is there another way to handle this besides an opt-in prompt ...
I have a proprietary project. It's a simple authentication library. I want to write open source(BSD) extension/examples for it. These examples interface code, connecting my authentication library to a database containing users. I'm providing examples which people hardly ever use out of the box, but are excellent starti...
I'm currently developing a replication system to keep data in-synch between an arbitrary number of servers. Some of these servers exist in one cluster on one LAN. Others exist somewhere else in the world. I'm wondering what are the pros/cons of different paths that we choose to flow replicated data on between servers...
Well, I am not sure about is this is the right StackExchange site to ask this, but since can accept question about Software law, i think it's almost on topic here. If I use creative commons music for non commercial usage in my project, it's fine if my final product is freeware. But, what if it becomes ad-supported? It'...
I am trying to determine the maturity of PyPy by other means than reading the opinion of the developers. Therefore, I am interested in hearing about any high-profile mission-critical projects using PyPy. All other indicators of maturity seem fine. I am just missing this one before I decide on utilizing it for my main p...

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