It’s probably fair to say anyone working in software knows a term called platform. It’s a term borrowed from transportation industry, where a raised and flat space on which passengers trains in a station. In software, it means something you can leverage, either an environment for running your software or a development library for building your applications.
Like many things in software, platform has never had a clear definition. Different people basically have their own versions of definitions. That is not necessarily a bad thing – at least it helped Read more... (477 words, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)
After Java 6.0 released in 2006, it’s been 5 years during which Sun Microsystem was sold to Oracle. Today the 7.0 is finally GAed. It includes quite a few changes including small language changes as well as new and improved APIs.
The language changes are mostly small and may not affect you, for example, the switch statement now works with strings. The new try-with-resource statement, which is similar to using statement in C#, helps you with cleaner code, see the difference shown in the following Read more... (323 words, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)
While everyone can learn and practice programming, it’s hard to find a good software engineer, even harder to find a great one. My definition of a great software engineer is someone who can solve real world problems with software expertise, not someone who can only write code, or someone who can only talk about architecture on paper, or someone who complicates real world problems.
Yes, we can all learn programming related concepts, languages, tools, and etc. But how to use them effectively on a business problem is really a test stone for anyone. It’s important to study textbooks, learn from others; even more so to Read more... (641 words, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)
As software engineers, we most likely have learned the three key characteristics of object oriented programming: inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Over the years I study and practice OOP, I realized that inheritance is out of date and arguably misleading, therefore should be replaced.
In OOP, inheritance refers to a relationship between two classes in which a subclass inherits the properties and methods of its super class. The term inheritance is not really a good one because Read more... (531 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)
During last 60 some years after computer was invented, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, programming languages. If we include domain specific language (DSLs), which accorinding to Martin Fowler may include regular expression, spreadsheet, etc, the number can be even bigger, not to mention more programming languages continue to emerge.
This would be a big burden if we have to learn all of them. Luckily, we don’t have to. In fact, most of us just need to learn several most popular ones. Even better, these popular languages may look very similar in syntax. As a result, Read more... (493 words, estimated 1:58 mins reading time)
In object-oriented programming, static methods are the methods that are defined with static keyword. They don’t have access to non-static instance variables. This very limitation can be an easy cure for many programming pitfalls I’ve seen over the years. Read more... (341 words, estimated 1:22 mins reading time)
- A static methods prevents you from using instance variables for passing information around, for example, as parameters to or as result from it. As a general rule, you should not define an instance variable if it’s not an intrinsic property of a class or type. It may seem obvious,
While we in software industry debating which process to adopt for development, I found something in manufacturing very intriguing. On a recent article of Business Week The Case for Making It in the USA, it mentioned a GE factory in South Carolina where aircraft jet engines are made. What struck me is the following:
“Teams can adjust the line operation as they see fit to remove bottlenecks and maximize productivity. Recently, two teams came up with different ways to speed up the washing of turbine blades. The plant leader, rather than picking one way as the winner, approved buying equipment for each team to wash the blades its own way.“
I would say it’s pretty Read more... (617 words, estimated 2:28 mins reading time)
I have been reading Martin Fowler’s book Domain-Specific Language during last two months. Now I am not fully done with the book but have a good idea because the rest of the book is about individual DSL patterns, which I think are better read when used.
I got two key points from the book. One is that the key to DSL is semantic model (“The semantics of a program is what it means – that is, what it does when it executes”). You can implement semantic model as APIs/frameworks in system languages like Java. If you are confused by the question, “what is the difference between DSL and normal code on top of high level APIs? Read more... (527 words, estimated 2:06 mins reading time)
After Shreyas shared his experience with Vaadin in his comment on my previous post, I started to play with the web framework. As it advertises, it’s “a Java framework for building modern web applications that look great, perform well and make you and your users happy.”
Based on my experience, I think it’s a great framework that is very intuitive yet powerful. All you need to do is to write Java code in a similar way to using Java AWT and Swing for standalone applications. The minor different is Read more... (401 words, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
Many APIs have emerged since the inception of computer software. Its root can be traced back to the layered software architecture in which high layer calls to low layer. The low layer is not necessarily called APIs, but the other way is mostly true.
Initial APIs were inside a single or multiple vertical call stacks that share same memory space. As a result, you have good performance and ease of use. After that, inter-process communication (IPC) emerged and allowed API services to run in a different process for better Read more... (321 words, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)
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