I made a tongue-in-cheek comment in another question thread calling PHP a terrible language and it got down-voted like crazy. Apparently there are lots of people here who love PHP. So I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing? What makes PHP a good language? Here are my reasons for disliking it: PHP has inconsistent naming of built-in...
This is half rant, half question. Is it worth using Grails? I'm trying to develop a relatively simple database drive web applications. My expertise is in Java so naturally Grails seemed like a good choice. At first I thought of using Spring, JPA and Hibernate, but having used that previously I've ran into all sorts of tedious configurat...
Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution, where one unit of a commodity can be exchanged for another unit of the same commodity in the same quantity and grade. I've worked at more than one company that stated openly that their goal was developer fungibility. This mis...
Why can't enum's constructor access static fields and methods? This is perfectly valid with a class, but is not allowed with an enum. What I'm trying to do is store my enum instances in a static Map. Consider this example code which allows lookup by abbreivation: public enum Day { Sunday("Sun"), Monday("Mon"), Tuesday("Tue"), Wedne...
Often when beginning a new project, I start out with what I believe to be the best of intentions in terms of how to structure the codebase. I love the idea of numerous small modules that do one thing well, are de-coupled from other parts of the codebase, and could potentially be reused by myself in other (similar) projects or open source...
I'm a java programmer, and if I see something that: I don't know about or just want to find a method description without opening an ide or am on support I type java [classname] into google, and there it is. If I try this crazy stunt for C# I'll come up with a whole heap of tutorials (how do I use it etc). If I manage to get to MSD...
Every time Microsoft releases a new version of visual studio, they always require me to convert my solution and project files to 'the latest version.' Even with something as simple as a "Hello World" solution, I need to go through their conversion wizard! And, to make things worse, the new visual studio solution files aren't compatible...
I'm trying to move toward TDD, ORM, Mocking, ect. I need a good example of a line of business app that uses an ORM preferably NHibernate. It has to be open source and use the repository pattern. I learn best by example, I have played around with the repository pattern and unit of work pattern but not in any meaningful applications. I'...
I feel that while I love J2ME and Java it's hypocritical of them to have two APIs for Java. Java was designed with "One code, many platforms" in mind, and now it's more like "One API for every OS, and one API for everything smaller than a netbook." I see a lot of J2ME emulators and such being ported to things like the PSP, and other cons...
I mean, really, what is the point of SOAP? Web services have been around for a while, and for a while it seemed that the terms 'SOAP' and 'Web service' were largely interchangeable. However SOAP always seemed unwieldy and massively overcomplicated to me. Then REST came along, and suddenly web services made sense. As Joel Spolsky says,...
I'm so tired of having to learn yet another Java web framework every other day. JSP, Struts, Wicket, JSF, JBoss Seam, Spring MVC to name just a few - all this countless frameworks out there try to address the same issues. However, none of them really solves the fundamental problems - that's why there are still coming up more and more new...
Recently I found on a blog this: " So I changed my mind and now my single reason that identify good programmers is “A good programmer is the one that put code in production” it means that good programmers makes programs that works and works for long time. Surely I really think that with DI, IoC, AOP you can create bette...
I finally figured out how to split panes in Xcode, and I even finally found out that if I hold option when I split panes, I can do a vertical split too. But I seem to have run into a bug. When I spawn a separate text editor and split panes within it, I can split panes horizontally, or vertically, but not both. Has anyone else run into t...
For an aspiring theatre actor, making it to broadway probably represents success. For a karate newbie, achieving a black belt, probably means everything. As a passionate programmer who just doesn't code for a living... for whom life without computers (I guess programmer is the wrong word here - a geek maybe?) is unimaginable - What shou...
Can someone explain to me how VBA for Access could ship without a simple Max(x,y) Function? I know it can be done: IIf(x > y, x,y) but really... why? ...
Hi folks, Server: MS Sql Server 2008 When i create an indexed view .. and i then alter the view's schema, the index's all get dropped. It's sooo annoying! Can someone explain why this is? At first I thought that it could be because the fields the index requires are not in the schema any more (we did just alter it, right?) .... but fo...
Oracle's default date format is YYYY-MM-DD. Which means if I do: select some_date from some_table ...I lose the time portion of my date. Yes, I know you can "fix" this with: alter session set nls_date_format='yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'; But seriously, why isn't the above the default? Especially in a DBMS where the two primary time...
If you right-click in a standard MFC CEdit control you get a standard undo/cut/copy/paste/select-all context popup menu. But CRichEditCtrl doesn't provide the same thing as far as I can tell. Is there any good reason why it was left out? Such a pain having to write custom controls to add in 'standard' functionality! And how can it most...
It seems like cookies and querystrings are firmly established in the web world. Nevertheless, javascript makes you do all kinds of splits and parsing to get at the keys and values. Anyone have any insight on why there isn't more intuitive native support for things like cookies and querystrings? Admittedly, there are plugins and framewor...
I spent all my time yesterday trying to get ANY Rails tagging plugin to work. While installation was straightforward, I have to say the amount of documentation on how to use any of these plugins was dismal at best... For the record, I tried: is_taggable acts_as_taggable_on acts_as_taggable_on_steroids acts_as_taggable_redux In every i...