I am looking for actual studies/analytics type data (real numbers) concerning the use of a standardized or consistent (read: accessible and beautiful) user experience / user interface. Specifically this information will be cited to support standardizing and reworking an existing (hideous) web application, but I'm pretty certain that cu...
Functional Decomposition, what is it useful for and what are it's pros/cons? Where are there some worked examples of how it is used? ...
I'm trying to figure out the css to display an image with a 1px black border then a 9px white border around that. Is there an easy way to do this? The div around image answer almost works, but I still have big gaps on either side of my image (outside of the 1px border and inside of the 9px border). It seems like the div tag is stretchin...
I have an XSD - it is designed to allow clients to my webservice to send XML data in a structured and robust way (that's the whole point of XSDs right?). However I am designing some other part of the system and was going to use this XSD because it does 99.999999% of what I need it to do - it has all the data I could ever want - except i...
Hello, A quick design question for the worth. I need to share data between C++ client and Java server. The Client talks to the server using SOAP. The issue is - I have a generic interface serving all kinds of requests on the Java backend. I don't want to "pollute" is with specific kind of request object which will most of the times re...
It is pretty common, especially in applications with an ORM, to have a two way mapping between classes. Like this: public class Product { private List<Price> HistoricPrices { get; private set;} } public class Price { private Product Product { get; set; } } Is there an accepted way of maintaining this relationship in code? So ...
I have an application that returns data dependent on the time specified, I can specify days, months or years. The issue is that if I were to run the application today and ask it to return data from 1 month ago and in 3 months time I were to ask the application to return data from that date for the previous 1 month (i.e. 1 month from date...
Suppose to have a library which is developed in two levels: a core, low-level one, and a high level one. My design is focused at reducing the coupling between the two. One of the routines of the high level layer accepts an enumeration (say, FOO=0, BAR=1, BAZ=2). This enumeration is used directly by the low level routines for its final p...
what are the best ways to manage code in a single-form app that has many different components? for example, think of a financial app that has a product picker for browsing/choosing a product to view; a handful of real-time tickers for prices, interest rates, or whatever; a scrolling news feed; various charts; a grid displaying locally ca...
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? ...
There are so many programming languages which support the inclusion of mini-languages. PHP is embedded within HTML. XML can be embedded within JavaScript. Linq can be embedded within C#. Regular expressions can be embedded in Perl. // JavaScript example var a = <node><child/></node> Come to think of it, most programming languages can ...
I'm having a debate with some engineers and trying to decide on the right choice here. I'd like to get your thoughts on this topic. Totally subjective. We've built an API for an iPhone app. It connects to our pre-existing business layer. The API is stateless but requires authentication for most calls/actions. But because there is authe...
My application deals with percentages a lot. These are generally stored in the database in their written form rather than decimal form (50% would be stored as 50 rather than 0.5). There is also the requirement that percentages are formatted consistently throughout the application. To this end i have been considering creating a struct c...
I have 3 classes: Controller, DAL and Entity. The controller calls the DAL requesting an Entity. The DAL retrieves the entity data from the DB and creates a new Entity class which is then returned to the Controller. How do I show this on a UML sequece chart (no need to show the DB)? 2nd question: how should we share UML diagrams on S...
In regard to static data table design. Having static data in tables like shown: Currencies (Code, Name). Row example: USD, United States Dollar Countries (Code, Name). Row example: DE, Germany XXXObjectType (Code, Name, ... additional attributes) ... does it make sense to have another (INTEGER) column as a Primary Key so that all For...
I'm writing an emulation of the HP 7974 HPIB/GPIB tape drive. The documentation that I have shows that secondary address 31 (0x1F) is used for the self test functions, but I have not found any documentation that describes what those do. One of the legacy programs I run does some of those functions and I'd like to emulate the functions c...
Why would you ever use interface it you are going to have only one implementation of it? ...
Lately the company hired a technical analyst for the dev team. For all new projects it's his tasks to analyse the clients demands and come up with an analysis design that can be used as a starting base for actual development. Now apparently this techincal design will contain some sort of class diagram that should be used as a guide by t...
In our app, we ask people to specify a file share. These files are analyzed, usually 1-5. Someone apprently specified \localhost\c$\windows. It's one thing that it's a intranet app. Question is what is a good approach to prevent such misuse? ...
I'm designing a personal project which is largely database driven. I'm trying to come up with a good design for how to handle database interop, and I'd like the input of the experienced minds here at StackOverflow. Is the following good design, or is there a more standard way of handling communication with the database? EDIT I was main...