Software As She’s Developed

Don Norman points out that usability isn’t everything, based on media comments about ITunes and Napster: What is going on here? Both reviewers really like their iPods and the iTune service and clearly consider the entire experience far superior to that of Napster. Yet they think Napster “offers a real alternative.” Why? The business […]

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Ted Neward and Floyd Marinescu make some good points on EJB - is it really about distribution, impact of open-source, etc. The history of EJBs is a good demonstration of the “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” principle applied to an entire industry. At the time, it seemed like “this is what we’ll do in the future, […]

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Tony Darugar hates patterns: I’ve seen more horrendous programming sins committed in the name of patterns than almost any other possible justification. I’m not sure if it’s really worse than other justifications. “XP” and “agile”, for example, are now being used to justify any (lack of) process not involving upfront design and documentation. That […]

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I’m opening up the Ajax wiki soon and one of the really important things there will be to let everyone add examples. So I kicked off an Ajax Examples page. It’s based mostly on the original content linked from FiftyFourEleven, blatently combined with most of the showcases featured on Ajaxian. And a few others for […]

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Erik Pascarello (ahoy hoy Ajaxian) has created a library to track the user’s session. This is a nice implementation of an Ajaxian Heartbeat. One of the biggest frustrations with traditional web applications is that users get timed out. With Ajax, you have a few more options: Keep sending requests to the server, so the server knows the […]

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Testing and designing with mock objects Welcome to the second half of this unit testing podcast series. Last week’s podcast covered some unit-testing tips and JUnit patterns. This week covers mock objects - the how and why, Behaviour based testing versus state-based testing (I call it behaviour here, Fowler calls it interaction.) Mock objects and example. EasyMock, JMock. Test-driven development, designing with mock objects. Wiring […]

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Apparently, blogging is not in the interests of graduate students. Hannibal @ arstechnica agrees: Ultimately, I think the answer to this dilemma is pretty clear: graduate students simply should not blog, and if they do blog they should never do so under their real names. As a grad student, your writing time is much […]

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Can software be too tolerant of errors? The mantra of “tolerant on input, strict on output” (something like that, from Bertrand Meyer) may be true for end-users and maybe even APIs, but would you like your compiler to silently sweep warnings under the rug? In most cases, no. This is where web development with Firefox gets interesting. […]

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There’s a lot of talk about slapping XML stylesheets over RSS feeds. A new oreillynet article (ta Mike Levin) explains how. I guess this started with a few prominent sites like the BBC strutting their style, and now everyone’s in on the act. No doubt that it’s much better for users, but it’s unfortunate that […]

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Hoare’s “Hints on Programming Language Design” was written in December, 1973 and the first few pages on general principles are still very pertinent. Here’s a summary. A programming language should support the three most difficult tasks in programming: Program Design - “A good programming language should give assistance in expressing not only how the program is to […]

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