General Development Archive

Before tackling a seemingly complex code problem with lots of functions and complex logic, Jeff Cogswell recommends trying a finite state machine - a set of states and appropriate rules and actions that go with those states - to greatly simplify your coding. Service oriented architectures sound complicated and daunting, but they're not so hard to implement. The concepts involved are actually fairly simple, and this article describes them by using examples drawn from the networking domain. Software consultant Stephen B. Morris describes some of the principles of service orientation in the down-to-earth contexts of C++ and networking.

Defect removal is preferred over defect survival. If some defect slips through the cracks, however, the C++ exception handling mechanism helps to fortify your software's fault tolerance, as Cameron and Tracey Hughes explain. Also, elsewhere on the same site, old maps were marked with the phrase "Here be Dragons" to help seafarers steer away from dangerous places; in programming the best way to avoid dealing with bad code is to avoid writing it. Diomidis Spinellis points out 10 giveaways to spot bad code that you (or others) may have written.

Good news! Inheritance and polymorphism can facilitate more concise code, which reduces waste throughout the lifecycle of a C++ product. By pushing more generic code into base classes, you can help reduce application code clutter as well as cutting down on code duplication. In this article, software consultant Stephen Morris insists that less code means less testing, lower maintenance costs, and easier upgrades.

"Visual XForms Designer is a set of graphical tools and interfaces for expediting the creation and editing of documents with XForms-based content. This stamdards-based, easy-to-use Eclipse plug-in makes the process of creating documents with XForms content easier, faster, and simpler."

"This article is a first in series that deals with secure programming and related issues. Before we begin though, let's first define secure programming. A 'secure program' is an application that sits on a security boundary, taking input from a source that does not have the same access rights as the program. Such programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs."

Cameron and Tracey Hughes conclude their exploration of cluster programming with an example of a cluster-based text-file analysis utility that processes and analyzes multiple files in parallel.