::Manageability::Random thoughts on the manageability of complex software."Protection Insurance" The New Business Model- July 22, 2003 It seems "Protection Insurance" is the latest trend in business models. SCO started the ball rolling by introducing a new licensing model. The new licensing model is that to avoid the "possibility" of a lawsuit, it may be wise to license their product. Now its still as murky as ever if SCO has a case that can hold up in the court of law, however that's not the point of the business model. The point is to make a credible looking threat and make you pay to avoid the...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/protection_insurance_the_new_business Have EJB Vendors Just Discovered OR Mapping- July 19, 2003 Cedric Beust writes about "Optimistic Concurrency" in Weblogic's EJB product. Andrew Oliver writes that JBoss has that too. That's all nice and well, but shouldn't you have had this since the beginning It just amazes me that with the introduction of EJB 2.0 and its more reasonable attempt at addressing CMP (Container Managed Peristence) that people are beginning to discover Object Oriented to Relational mapping. Even Marc Fleury , the boss of JBoss, in his paper "Why I...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/have_ejb_vendors_just_discovered Will Software Patents Destroy The U.S. Software Industry- July 19, 2003 There's a pretty disturbing thread going on a TheServerSide. It was supposed to be a discussion about Hibernate, unfortunately its degenerated into an extremely heated and personal shouting match between the Ward Mullins (CTO of ThoughtInc) and Gavin King (co-author of Hibernate). Apparently, Ward is taking the playbook out of SCO, and playing the Patent FUD game. That is, if you're not a commercial entity, then the software you're distributing hasn't been cleared by the...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/will_software_patents_destroy_the Principles of Manageable Object Oriented Software- July 15, 2003 Mike Hogan put together a list of his experiences working on a 50,000 line code base, it's all pretty interesting. That made me dig up some old information about this to better grasp of the subject matter. The first ancient text comes from Robert Martin who compiled a collection of principles for Object Oriented design. These principles help guide a developer as to when and why to refactor towards better manageability: The Open Closed Principle (OCP). A module should be.http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/principles_of_manageable_object_oriented Non-Static Method Calls Considered Harmful- July 14, 2003 Kasia and Simon are both recommending that .toString() never be called. Rather, they recommend String.valueOf() to avoid the dreaded NullPointerException. Well it's a pretty good tip especially within catch blocks. However, extrapolating, should non-static method calls ever be used at all That's an extremely radical proposal and I don't think its going to fit well with many people. However, here's a rule of thumb, wrappers of primitive types, strings or...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/non_static_method_calls_considered Holy Data Binding and Access!- July 8, 2003 Andrej Koelewijn links me to this blog "Dive into BC4J". Turns out, Oracle has just submitted a new JSR "A Standard Data Binding and Data Access Facility for J2EE". In true capitalist form they've submitted a standard to something that they already have in the lab. Check out this viewlet for JDeveloper 9.0.5 and prepared to be stunned! I just got in the mail Oracle's developer magazine, it came with a CD. I was going to throw the CD in the trash...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/holy_data_binding_and_access There's Gold in Servicing the Low-end and Disenfranchised!- July 8, 2003 Stumbled upon an insightful article "AI Startup Strategic Planning for a Successful Start-up". Which says this, money isn't made by building a better moustrap rather recommends the following: Service low-end, disenfranchised users. Enable larger population of less skilled users to complete a task. Service market segments with lower profit margins than established, large manufacturers can afford. Apply new or existing technologies from supply chains that differ from established...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/there_s_gold_in_servicing Should Meta Tags Be Considered Harmful- July 8, 2003 There's an interesting thread at the AspectJ mailing list, it revolves around the advantages of AspectJ over emerging AOP frameworks. One question that keeps coming up is the advantages or disadvantages of meta attributes (i.e. tags). Gregor Kizcales argument against tags is that it's not as scalable as defining poincuts. Furthermore, because when you insert a tag in a class it isn't "oblivious", an essential characteristic of AOP (see definition). At the eve of.http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/should_meta_tags_be_considered Refactoring to Implicit Invocations- July 7, 2003 "Implicit Invocation" is a term coined by Garlan and Shaw in their research on sofware architectures. A couple of years later Dirk Reihle puts together a desgin pattern on "Integrating Implicit Invocation with Object Orientation". We are all very familiar with this architecture style or design patterns (incidentally in the early days design patterns were also called micro-architectures"), we've seen it in JMS based message systems or event driven Swing programming. However, an...http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/refactoring_to_implicit_invocations Profitability = Functionality + Manageability- July 7, 2003 Perez's Law: Profitability = Functionality + Manageability Yes, a pretty insightful new law. It's actually derived from Jim Coplien's observation about the dichotomy between function and structure: Both structure and function are important to profitability. When we think of profitability we most often think of the functional side: What can we sell, and for how much The functional side is directly visible to the customer. Function is what customers are willing to spend money for;..http://www.jroller.com/ceperez/entry/profitability_functionality_manageability |