General Development Archive

Salon's Scott Rosenberg explains why even small-scale programming projects can take years to complete, one programmer is often better than two, and the meaning of "Rosenberg's Law."

"While defensive programming effectively guarantees the condition of a method's input, it becomes repetitive if it is pervasive across a series of methods. Andrew Glover shows you an easier way to add reusable validation constraints to your code using the power of AOP, design by contract, and a handy library called OVal."

Discover how to use shell programming to modify the AIX System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) to develop, test, and install extensions safely.

"What if you were able to discover potential problems in your code prior to building it? Interestingly enough, there are Eclipse plugins for tools such as JDepend and CheckStyle that can help you discover problems before they are manifested in software. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall provides examples of installing, configuring, and using these static analysis plugins in Eclipse so that you can prevent problems early in the development life cycle."

The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by MIT for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. Alloy can be used to detect conceptual mistakes in the model before the coding starts. Scientific American has published an article about it.

"Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options."

Get a demonstration on how to use resource indexing with the Apache Derby database to develop Eclipse plug-ins. The Derby DB embedded in Eclipse allows you to create an SQL database on the client side with no security issues or network problems, such as an unstable connection or high latency.

The Java community has resisted closures so far, even as competing languages such as C# add them. Closures are anonymous functions with closed scope. It's best to think of a closure as a code block that you can use as an argument, with special scoping rules. This article dives deep into Closures and uses Ruby to show how closures work.

"MIT's Technology Review recently interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup in a two-part article (part one, part two). You may know Bjarne as the inventor of the C++ programming language. Indeed, he even maintains a comprehensive C++ FAQ that answers every imaginable C++ question. Here are a few select quotes from the interview that I found notable."

Following on from the tutorial in part 1 of this series, David Chisnall explores some more-flexible mechanisms for allowing processes to communicate on a POSIX-compliant system.

Revolution is descended in spirit from Hypercard (HC). When Apple's support for HC withered, Scott Raney developed Metacard (MC), a near clone. Metacard was then bought by Revolution (RR), based in Scotland. Metacard was two quite distinct things: an engine, and an IDE. When Metacard was sold, the MC IDE became public domain. It still exists, is volunteer maintained, and it can be used with the latest RR engine. Some on the RR user mailing list prefer the much simpler MC IDE to the RR IDE, at least for initial project development. Other IDEs are possible, and there is a third party (non-free) IDE called Galaxy.

"D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. See this comparison of D with C, C++, C#, and Java."

The Cocotron is an open source project which implements an Objective-C API very similar to that described by Apple Computer's Foundation and AppKit framework documentation. "The Cocotron Development Tools are a gcc based cross-compiler toolchain which plug into Xcode, once installed they enable Xcode projects written in Objective-C to be compiled for platforms other than Mac OS X, such as Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The CDT is used to compile The Cocotron and non-OS X targets."

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.