As a programmer, I don't have the best design skills. I often find the need to have a single graphic or even an entire web site designed. What sites have you used to get the graphics you needed and would you use them again? ...
I am developing a C++ class library containing domain model classes, and I would like to add support for instantiating these classes from various persistence mechanisms, i.e. databases and file. The user of the class library should be given an interface(?) against which to program a class that can transfer the data from/to the persistenc...
Well i am currently working on a project doing some UI mockups when certain users wanted to have two logo on the top left ot the website. One is to indicate what is the website about then another is to indicate that this website is actually belong to this particular sector. I thought that UI design wise this is very bad because two logo...
When programming by contract a function or method first checks whether its preconditions are fulfilled, before starting to work on its responsibilities, right? The two most prominent ways to do these checks are by assert and by exception. assert fails only in debug mode. To make sure it is crucial to (unit) test all separate contract ...
I am already aware of UML but I want to look at all the options before I pick. Essentially I will need to have a way (preferably visual) to plan out the flow and actions of programs. They will all be web applications written in PHP or Python. What (preferably free) ways are there to plan a program in this way beyond UML and common flow ...
No matter what type of web application you are building, there is usually a generic template of features/modules that always need to be included. Note: These are high level modules, the details will vary per implementation. Here is my list, care to add to it? User management User Role/ Security Error Handling Localization Language Su...
Hi all, I had this questions since the time I learnt about object-oriented programming. Now, I have got a wonderful forum I thought of asking this. Lets say we are implementing an employee management application using EJB. Now, there are 2 ways of doing this. Normally, we create entities (POJOs) which represent an employee. Then we ...
Just wondering how you would do this. Would you have some sort of process that scanned through all the actions that took place over the past X minutes? Would you trigger a badge update check every time any action took place (up vote, down vote, tag, etc.)? It seems like this would be a relatively expensive process one way or another. ...
Hello i have a problem with the design of a VetoableChangeListener: I implement the VetoableChangeListener interface to listen changes of a property in a model class, when the model fires the vetoableChange(PropertyChangeEvent evt) throws PropertyVetoException i try to save the change in a DB, which could fail (by a SQLException,...
I am looking for some recommendations on good places to find libraries of controls/templates/styles for WPF. I know about the usual places like Infragistics, but it seems to me that there should be some kind of community effort by now to share nice, clean, well written controls for WPF controls. I am not big on the design side, and it w...
I recently heard of BDD and found it very similar to TDD. Which of these two do you use (if any)? and which are the pros and cons of each? ...
I know how to use the checkboxlist in ASP.NET to display options retrieved from a database. What I don't know how to do is to make this 2-dimensional. That is, I need a list of checkboxlists where I don't know how long the list is; both dimensions of the checkboxlist will be determined by list of people (pulled from database) list o...
Many websites have the concept of sending messages from user to user. When you send a message to another user, the message would show up in their inbox. You could respond to the message, and it would show up as a new entry in that message thread. You should be able to see if you've read a given message already, and messages that hav...
If you were tasked to build an event scheduling system that supported recurring events, how would you do it? How do you handle when an recurring event is removed? How could you see when the future events will happen? i.e. When creating an event, you could pick "repeating daily" (or weekly, yearly, etc). One design per response please...
What's your favorite open source database design/modeling tool? I'm looking for one that supports several databases, specially Firebird SQL but can't find one on Google. Even if written in Java :D ...
Hello, I'm developping a small UML Class editor in Java, mainly a personal project, it might end up on SourceForge if I find the time to create a project on it. The project is quite advanced : I can create classes, move them around, create interfaces, create links, etc. What I'm working on is the dialog box for setting class/interface...
The classic "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" actually introduced most of us to the idea of design patterns. However these days I find a book such as "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" (POEA) by Martin Fowler, much more useful in my day to day work. In discussions with fellow developers, ...
Are there any best practices (or even standards) to store addresses in a consistent and comprehensive way in a database ? To be more specific, I believe at this stage that there are two cases for address storage : you just need to associate an address to a person, a building or any item (the most common case). Then a flat table with t...
This question about unit testing best practices mentions designing classes for dependency injection. This got me thinking as to what exactly that might mean. Having just started working with inversion of control containers I have some ideas on the issue, so let me throw them against the wall and see what sticks. The way I see it, th...
I'm currently working on a class that calculates the difference between two objects. I'm trying to decide what the best design for this class would be. I see two options: 1) Single-use class instance. Takes the objects to diff in the constructor and calculates the diff for that. public class MyObjDiffer { public MyObjDiffer(MyObj ...