Not in code

This funny video was created by the witty guys at RailsEnvy. I’ve embedded it for your convenience.

Found via the Ruby on Rails weblog.

Kirk (via Erik’s linkblog) blogs:

The purpose of the [->] operator is to provide a short hand notation for properties. The syntax that we would normally use is;

a.setFoo( b.getFoo());

With the “->” operator we would see;

a->foo = b->foo;

How we’d currrently coding this is;

a.foo = b.foo where foo would have to be more visiable than private.

My initial, not very well thought out, straight from gut, but strong reaction is “Yuck!”. I may elaborate in a later post, but feeling too lazy to post anything more useful that a subjective opinion.

Disclaimer: Very little thought, much emotion.

Q. What is the Liskov Substitution Principle?

A. I’ll tell you what it isn’t: throw new UnsupportedOperationException();

*Shudder*

Ok, so most of you probably don’t even know what Evolution Analyser is at this stage…

It’s a product that I’ve been working on for the last few months as part of a university project to learn how to apply agile development methods effectively. Evolution Analyser itself is a Java based application that analyses Java source code and produces a number of unique metrics and reports that when interpreted correctly can tell you a number of things about the “evolution” of the architecture of a Java application over a number of versions. The product itself is the brainchild of Rajesh Vasa, the lecturer for this university subject. It is an area that he has been researching for a number of years and is something that he is very passionate about.

It’s uses? There are so many really, but here are some:
* Analysing open source projects for architectural stability to minimise risk
* To provide a quick “health indicator” of a software project, great for managers
* A feedback mechanism that can quickly communicate when a large architectural change has occurred, again great for higher level managers
* Quickly analysing the software evolution of a company your firm’s planning to buy out/invest heavily in
* And much more depending on how far you can stretch your imagination…

We’re currently deliberating about the future of this project after the subject completes (which is pretty soon). In the meantime do have a browse around our project Wiki. Please excuse the mess, we currently use the Wiki more as a communication medium for the team than as a product website. If you do decide to look at the Wiki then the project diaries section in particular may provide a view into the struggles that our team faced trying to cope with learning so much while still trying to produce a useful piece of quality software. There a link on this blog’s sidebar, for your convenience, here’s another one http://evolution.hiremaga.com/

Your choice of font can have a significant impact on the screen real estate that you’re left with when you’re programming, especially if you don’t have a monitor and video adapter that support a high resolution. The reason that the font is so important is that some fonts are more readable than others while taking the same amount or even less physical screen space. On the reccomendation of a colleague(thanks Neale) I’ve just switched to a font from www.proggyfonts.com. I now use proggy square (TTF & slashed zero) at font size 12. This gives me 77 lines in eclipse at 1280 x 1024 compared with the 55 lines using courier new at size 10 that I used to get. All, this without in my opinion anyway, increasing the strain on my eyes or reducing readability – very cool.

Yes, you read that right, J2SE 5.0 is out! You can download it here, I reccomend trying the bundle with the Netbeans 4 beta. I haven’t had a chance to try it for myself, but I have heard many good things about Netbeans 4. Oh goodie, I can’t wait for the weekend! :)

Some of you might be fortunate enough to be attending the Sun Developer Day this wednesday. It looks like I won’t be able to go because I’ve already taken a whole heap of time off from work for assignments and exams. I’m still pushing management to let me go because the agenda looks pretty interesting.

I’ve been working with Coldfusion in recent times and haven’t used Java in a while. I was really looking forward to using the Developer day to reaquaint myself with some of the happenings in the Java world, especially the changes in 1.5.

It looks I might just get my chance to work with J2EE again considering that Coldfusion MX is build on JRun and offers quite a few ways of leveraging it’s relationship with Java. Maybe I’ll write a piece on this after I get a chance to do some experimenting.

I hope that I can still make it, maybe with some luck (and a miracle?) management will change their mind…