In preparation for a blog post about programming, I'm gathering ideas around areas of programming and software development that are actual, new, fresh, cool, interesting and are potentially profitable in the near future. I've gathered these ideas: apps for Facebook and Twitter apps for other API based websites (social apps) cell phone...
Edit This question has gone through a few iterations by now, so feel free to look through the revisions to see some background information on the history and things tried. I'm using a CompletionService together with an ExecutorService and a Callable, to concurrently call the a number of functions on a few different webservices throug...
I was reading an article based on Mobile Development in 2020 and run into such a pessimistic claim: "But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this," said Mr Laurs. He said th...
One of the key properties to designing comprehensible software (and, indeed, designing anything at all) is to develop a good set of abstractions. These days, those abstractions include things like functions, classes, interfaces, recursion, and higher-order functions. But what else is there? How can we further abstract our designs, so tha...
Technology has brought the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) a faster way to do things and not necessarily a better way. Many messaging platforms have been created. Many programs and systems have been build. A lot of information is now available at an instant. Perhaps the three most important contributions are the email and instant...
With Sun being taken over by Oracle, Oracle will arguably gain control of Glassfish. I do understand that Glassfish is community driven but most of the contributions do come out of Sun at this time. Its a great App Server and perfect for many cost-sensitive customers. However, if Oracle decides to pull the rug from under our feet on th...
We are trying to compare 7 different programming technologies for browser based client applications. Please give your thoughts on this speed comparison. What will the future bring? Will HTML5 replaces Flash and Silverlight in the browser or will JavaScript always be too slow for any CPU intensive applications. Could Roozz plugin comp...
I would like to know if this is really helpful to have experience with Macs on the job market for developers with B.Sc.. I have been using Windows and Linux since the start of undergrads and I'm pretty good with those in coding/using/configurating. So, I feel like it may be helpful to buy a Mac and get some little Iphone/Mac dev experien...
I am using django-compress with far future expires for my css and js files. Works great. I'd like to do something similar for other static content (images, flash, etc). I can set a far future expires on this content, but I must manually rename the files when they change. Is there a better way to handle this? ...
I've got a tabbed navigation bar where I'd like the open tab to have a shadow to set it apart from the other tabs. I'd also like the whole tab section to have a single shadow (see bottom horizontal line) going up, shading the bottom of all tabs except for the open one. I'm going to use CSS3's box-shadow property to do it, but I can't f...
Summary: It seems to me that: wrapping fields representing a logical state into a single immutable consumable object updating the object's authoritative reference with a call to Interlocked.CompareExchange<T> and handling update failures appropriately provides a kind of concurrency that renders the "lock" construct not only unnecess...
I have had this debate with some peers off and on for a while. I am certified in the HP tools, but have been spending more and more time with VSTS Test Edition 2008. I am looking for opinions on what people think of the future of both products and how they compete. LoadRunner's strengths include its vast array of protocols supported. ...
Here are two previous questions regarding this topic: Catch multiple Exceptions at once? More Elegant Exception Handling Than Multiple Catch Blocks? I was working today and thought this might be an appropriate syntax should this feature ever be added to the C# language. Anyone have any opinions about it? The type of e must be a base...
Today we can look back on the evolution of computer science and see structural programming, functional programming, and finally object-oriented programming. Additionally, things like meta-programming (reflective programming) and combining approaches into a single language (e.g. LINQ) are current. Another trend is template-meta-programmi...
Should today's patterns be seen as defects or missing features in Java and C++? Subroutine was a design pattern for machine language in the 50s and 60s. Object-Oriented Class was a design pattern for C in the 70s. Visitors, Abstract Factories, Decorators, and Façades are design patterns for Java and C++ today. What will tomorrow's l...
I've already developed some simple applications in Rails(just to test) without any knowleadge of Ruby, but now I want to change my life, I'm going to start learning Ruby(and never learn Rails for some personal reasons) and focus only on it, but before doing this I need tp know some things: How can I build GUI applications with it? It'...
I'm on the fence. Some years back I was a palm coder who saw the death coming. I didn't jump ship right off, but I spent significant time learning to code for Wince. When palm died (I was sad) I slipped right into a new role as the CE guy. Then some time later I moved to a new gig and I'm one of many CE guys. Not that I see this company...
I am beginning to heavily invest in WPF and was wondering what those more knowledgeable than myself thought as to the wisdom of this decision. Is WPF the way forward? ...
I am a non-web programmer, but I am getting now more interested in web technologies. I know that HTML and JavaScript are today the fundamental technologies for web applications, but it also seems that actually they were not created strictly for that. (HTML was created for web pages, JavaScript to make them a bit dynamic). Does it have a...
My Google-fu is failing me -- Is there a Future<T> type in .NET? I thought I remembered seeing some code for that, but maybe I was reading Java.... By the way, my musing started after reading This Article ...