What is your opinon about Community Server like platforms ?
if can choose a platform to work with , when you build a new application would you prefer to build it from scratch or use platform like Community Server ? ...
architecture
Enterprise Service/Data Buses for a new company's infrastructure?
I'm designing a system for a new business and am in a unique "carte blanche" position. Like every business it plans to last a long time and grow to an indeterminate size. Is it worth while going whole hog and developing a full enterprise architecture with explicit data and service buses where each layer is a webservice of some kind.....
MVC in .NET: How to not duplicate classes?
I have a Person class in the Model and want to assign 15 of its attributes to labels in the View. The View shouldn't access the Model. That means the Controller will handle creating the Person. How does the View get these Person attributes from the Controller? If the Controller contains a member of Type Person, the View can do someth...
Library Database System Design
Hello, I have a library, and I want to migrate it from an old system to a new optimized one. The old library was built using MS Access (mdb files), where each book is a file by itself. Each book consists of two tables, one for chapters titles and the second for contents. There is also one mdb file that contains all books names, pages n...
Separating presentation/web-services (RoR/Java)
Is it a good practice to develop web-service and web-site in two different languages, on two different servers? E.g. right now I create a Java web-service running on Glassfish and Ruby on Rails presentation layer running in the same server. I'd like to leave web-service on the same server but use Ruby 1.9, running in Passenger. Is it a...
ASP.NET MVC project architecture
I am pretty confused about the ASP.NET MVC project architecture. In ASP.NET WebForm I am normally for small to medium size project using following Project pattern DAL <-- communicate through DTO/reader/dataset -- > BL <--> UI I think in MVC application should be like DAL <-- communicate through DTO/reader/dataset --> BL is Model <-...
Social network site with webconferencing
I'm preparing to build a social networking web site that should have some form of webconferencing. First of all uploading should - if possible- be web-based. I want to make use of standard webcams probably in conjuction with a flash app that will upload the video stream. The server then will broadcast the stream together with storing it...
How to implement "class versioning" (using different version of the same class)
Here is the problem : our main class (say : Contract) change every year. Some properties are added, other are removed. We don't know how it will look next year. It may change a lot or not at all. On the other hand, we now (new requirement...) have to keep an historic of every contracts. Each time the user update a contract, the whole ob...
Object-level transaction management pattern
I'm trying to find out the best way to handle transactions at object level (not database level). Short example: 4 objects A, B, C and D. A starts a transaction and calls methods in B and C. Whithin this transaction C is also calling D. The methods being called aren't supposed to always participate in this transaction, but can be called a...
What is the workflow you follow to design the software you're about to write?
Hi, I've started working on a fairly complicated software. It is for a personal project, but nonetheless I'm putting a lot of effort into it. Now, I'm used to work on other people's solutions / designs or on projects that grow in a very controllable way. This time, I started twice to code the basics and I rapidly found myself stuck. So ...
What does n-tier mean to you?
I have noticed over the years that different developers have different criteria for what constitutes a tier in the development of an n-tier system so I was curious about what the consensus is here at stackoverflow. Is separate logical layers sufficient to call it a separate tier or does it have to be deployable on a separate server (phy...
Difference between three tier vs. n-tier
I just came across the following sentence: As the industry has moved from a three tier model to n-tier models, the object relational impedance mismatch has become more prevalent. But I can't find a concise explanation of the difference between three tier and n-tier. I know what three tier is, and I assume n-tier just adds one or ...
What architecture? Distribute content building across a cluster.
Hi All, I am building an content serving application composing of a cluster of two types of node, ContentServers and ContentBuilders. The idea is to always serve fresh content. Content is fresh if it was built recently, i.e. Content.buildTime < MAX_AGE. Requirements: *ContentServers will only have to lookup content and serve it up (...
Business Logic Layer and Data Access layer: circular dependency
Hello, I’m having a little Architecture problem. In my project I have a Business Logic Layer (BLL) that contains all my business rules, models and OO API for the interface. Each object has static methods like getById that return an instance of said object. Each object also has methods like save and, delete. This is very straightforward ...
The dangers of hyper-normalization?
Several colleagues and I are faced with an architectural decision that has serious performance implications: our product includes a UI-driven schema builder that lets non-programmers build their own data types for a web app. Currently, it builds properly normalized schemas behind the scenes and includes some complex logic to alter the sc...
Need technology recommendation/suggestion
Hi there. We (my company) is trying to develop a solution (application) for document management. We have considered using MS Sharepoint Server 2007 or Sharepoint Services, but we need recommendation or suggestion for this. We are planning to use windows workflow fundation for various tasks like(task assignment, document approval, infor...
Where to put AppSettings when breaking monothic asp.net site into libraries?
I have some business objects which use: Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Item("SomeSetting") Now that I'm breaking those objects into their own library, it feels dirty to take a dependency on System.Web when nothing else in the library has anything to do with web. What is the proper way to do this? UPDATE: Fou...
Adapting to meet changing business requirements?
Ideas on how to develop software that is capable of adapting to meet changing business requirements? Any patterns, architectures, etc. Possibly some anecdotal examples would be great. This is more of a survey than a concrete questions. Thanks ...
Constructors or Static Methods for Loading and Saving Objects?
I'm trying to decide whether it is better to use static methods for loading/saving objects, or use constructor/instance methods instead. So, say for object Project, the instance version would be public Project(path) { // Load project here } public void Save(path) { // Save project here } And the static version would be public static...
Should object properties be filled in the constructor
I'm designing a new application and I'm undecided if I should fill my object properties on the constructor Public Sub New(UserId as integer) ' get database values dr = DataReader Me.FirstName = dr.fields(0) Me.LastName = dr.fields(1) End Sub Or create a factory with a method for each object type? Public Function getUs...