Hi everyone, Since I keep showing up late for answering questions tagged php where i actually know the answer i figured i'd try asking a question myself. I've been working on so many complete rewrites of a custom template engine in php for so long and so many times that i thought i'd ask for opinions. In short, this is the most import...
At the risk of getting downvoted I'm going to ask this anyway. What are your favorite metaphors for technical concepts? My most recent one I used was when a customer didn't understand why we would have to charge them for switching out one mapping api for another. My metaphor was: If you had a heat pump at your house and then boug...
I was wondering for a while about this topic and i would like to hear some opinions from the community. What i am wondering about is how to explain to a non-programmer the conceptual difference between a language like C and a language like Lisp. What I find challenging about this is to translate the knowledge of the language itself into ...
Hi, I am building a graphic board like project where i am facing a design issue. Main Class is Board which is a canvas responsible for handling mouse events when drawing shapes. It also has context variables such as currentShape or snapFlag to activate grid magnetism. To handle the moving / resizing / rotating of the shapes, they inhe...
I was discussing multiple inheritance vs. single inheritance with a friend of mine, and discovered that plainly, my conception of Object-Oriented design is completely different than his. I am mostly an Obj-C programmer, so Multiple Inheritance is not something I use daily. He is mostly a C++ programmer under Windows/PSP, so we probably ...
I am working on a simple CAD program which uses OpenGL to handle on-screen rendering. Every shape drawn on the screen is constructed entirely out of simple line segments, so even a simple drawing ends up processing thousands of individual lines. What is the best way to communicate changes in this collection of lines between my applicati...
Is there a way to do something similar to KVC but use the message name as the key itself? For example, rather than valueForKey:, is there a way for an object to respond to all messages? For example, say you have an XML document: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE ...> <employees> <employee> <name>Bill</name> <de...
In Java, Do objects encapsulate data so that not even other instances of the same class can access the data? Only when the keyword "private" is used? What are "accessor methods" in Java - methods like getName()? Thanks ...
I'm currently writing some documentation for our product. Most of the docs are just text based - but in some cases I'd like to add a diagram to help first time users visualize the process from a general perspective. Microsoft docs and articles have these all over. I don't want to use a class diagram as the components are more conceptual ...
I've never been happy with anything I've ever found. But not having good UML, or at a minimum some clear class diagrams, makes it difficult to move forward with design on a team. Especially if you're a team deeply engrained in Agile concepts wrapped in Scrum. UML Tools? Visio? Visual Studio? Other? ...
Every sample I come across has the entities and properties in the storage model named exactly the same as in the conceptual model. So in the mapping section, I can't tell whether an entity or property is from the storage model or conceptual model. This is a snippet of an Entity Framework diagram. Which "ID" fields are from the database ...
Approaching cmdlets in a conceptual way, How are they made? Are they compiled? Is it the equivalent of a batch file for Powershell? Is it a script or a binary? What is the structure used for storing these cmdlets? ...
I'm using a NSPersistantDocument backed by Core Data in my application. Each document has a number of settings that are only relevant to that document. For example the document needs to hold the unique ID of an Address Book Group, to update it at a later date. The way I'm thinking of approaching this is to have another model, DocumentS...
I am a high school student and am thinking of making a robot that draws using different colored markers. I would like some guidance as to where I should start with this program. What I want to do is to construct a program on the computer where you could draw the path you want the robot to draw and then using the bluetooth dongle and the...
One colleague compared programming to the clay molding process - first you define rough shape of the mass, then carve smaller and smaller details. What's Your take on programming, which metaphor would you use to describe programmer's work? ...
At times while at work I come across a task like creating a template.. which forms the pages of the client's websites..and I have often heard and read mails from the clients about Joomla templates, Word press templates et al.... I have a bit of doubt about this ... How far these all templates are different..for template design, what the...
Hi, I've got a window which opens a borderless dialog where you select some options. Once the options are set the dialog closes and the main window is enabled again. Not too difficult. But due to the changed options in the option screen I need to refresh the main window and prevent changes from beeing made before the refresh. So now ...
I am working on a concept product which tries to solve the domain problems of 'dynamic data masking'. This is an area where you don't get a lot of inputs when you do your standard google search. The idea is to ecrypt/substitute/shuffle/mask data in any enterprise context, regardless of technology. So, for instance, if were a call center...
The question is as simple as the title. I have a webapp (I have no clue as to what technology it was built on or what appserver it is running on). However, I do know that this webapp is being served by an Apache Server/ IIS Server / IBM Http Server. Now, I would like to have a plugin/ module / add-on at the web-server end, which would pa...
This is a conceptional question. I'm not (yet) familiar with the involved technologies, please bear this in mind. I'm thinking of developing a system that lets users make interactive queries, primarily for fault diagnostics. Users should be provided with the ability to start a "query" by entering some small peace of information. Let'...