Seth Ladd's Blog

Better Living Through Software "RDF is often a whipping-boy, but a red-herring in this discussion." Good discussion of RDF and SemWeb, explaining it and the issues.

Wired 11.09: The New X-Men The Mountain Dew-fueled all-nighter is history. Today's supercoders work 40 hours a week. And two to a computer. It's called extreme programming - and it's revolutionizing the software world.

Object Mentor - xpepisode.htm In order to demonstrate XP (eXtreme Programming) practices, Bob Koss (RSK) and Bob Martin (RCM) will pair program a simple application while you watch like a fly on the wall. We will use test first design and a lot of refactoring to create our application. What follows is a faithful re-enactment of a programming episode that the two Bob's actually did.

XProgramming.com - an Extreme Programming Resource XProgramming.com is a resource for information about Extreme Programming (XP), the exciting new streamlined software development process originally described by Kent Beck. XProgramming.com is offered as a community resource for those interested in XP and related topics.

Specifically, it shows how unit tests and simple design work together while programming. Observe how the coding process occurs in small steps, just enough implementation to make each test run. There's a rhythm to it, like a pendulum of a clock: test a little, code a little, test a little, code a little. I'm a big fan of Test Driven Development (TDD). My favorite aspect is that it allows me to write the least amount of code possible. I spent time making tests pass, instead of coming up with the coolest way to do it.

Emergent Design vs. Early Prototyping - Software Reality However, early prototyping (used correctly) provides many of the benefits of an agile approach (for example early feedback), whilst retaining the more rigorous benefits gained from designing a system before coding it up. This article seems to forget all about XP's Spike Solution phase. In this phase, if the solution to a problem is unknown, it's OK to do a Spike Solution. This is a quick test of a small slice of an application to prove, or figure out, what and where the pieces of an application might be. For instance, if there is a new persistence layer that might be nice to use, test it out in a Spike Solution. This seems to be sort of the ideas behind the article. I disagree with the article on a few points. For example, time is always important on projects. You never have time enough. Why waste it on prototyping code to throw it out? By using XP's other tenets (unit testing, constant refactoring) the beginn...

Software Reality - EJB's 101 Damnations Whilst writing the EJB modules for our JGenerator product, we started punting an email back and forth containing all the issues we had with EJB. And there were many. Before we knew it we ended up with 101 howlers. This is an old document, one that I just dug up. Some of the points are valid, some less. But it all adds up to one thing: EJBs are often used as the wrong solution.