Sun's Joshua Bloch On OOP/OOD In Java

f00zbll writes: "A good article about development and OOP/OOD. The lessons apply to most OO languages and OOD. Interview with Joshua Bloch over at Javaworld. Ignore the fact that Java is owned by Sun and use the tips to help your work/project/development."

Comments

Business vs Academic

[wayn3]

The trouble with these kinds of interviews is that although I appreciate and enjoy Mr. Bloch's contributions to Java and Mr. Venners' forum, they are speaking academicly and not through the world of business. This is a very narrowly focused article and should not be taken as direction for designing software.

I'd like to hear someone write about how to make the trade-offs architects really face:

• being forced to use lesser software products and tools due to cost or partnership arrangements;
• having time-to-market be a larger issue than software reuse
• attempting design and development when the skill set is diverse

These topics would be of greater value to the development community than articles which presume hypothetical arrangements.

Re:Business vs Academic

[jilles]

Time to market these days means being able to reuse and adapt the previous product's software as quickly as possible. A good design is essential for that and companies that don't do good design are outcompeted by companies who manage to produce better quality software in a shorter timeframe.

The reality of today is that software systems are very large (think millions of lines of code) that represent an investment of many manyears. A quick fix on such code can have a desastrous impact on the time to market of future products. I know of companies that effectively did not bring out new products for two years because they were busy redesigning their software in order to be able to meet future requirements(Netscape is a good example in the public domain).

One of the reasons Java is currently so successful and has seen a quicker time to market than .Net (which has yet to come to market) is good design. Sun spent a great deal of time thinking about security and flexibility as early as 1995. This investment has allowed Java to mature well before MS managed to get anything significant to market. SUN is actively working with industry partners in its much criticized JCP process. MS on the other hand is dictating standards. MS gets its standards out quicker but the ones that get through the JCP process are of such a quality that they are causing MS some very big headaches in for example the mobile applications domain.

I am from the academic world and (pretty rare for an acadamic) I frequently visit software developing companies to gather information for my research. The more successful of these companies invariably have very clever software designers in charge of the software development. Also these companies are very much aware that the quality of their software is their competitive edge.

Auhhh :-)

[sinserve]

This guy just gave me the encouragement I needed.

As a /standalone/ programmer/designer/analyst, I
developed this API design philosphy on my own.
Actually, I have evolved to it.

If you are in a one-mans shop, or do alot of coding
for a specific domain, try to roll out your own
layer of helper APIs on top of the system provided ones.

I work on win32 and ODBC: I have my own class
hierchies of *standard* dialogs for DB applications.
Ex: the ActiveX components for DB Appz (advanced
list views, financial stats, bar charts and graphs, etc.)
are really resource greedy (the updating required
for a dynaset database connection, with millions
of records being fetched per minute is very
expensive.)
So I wrote some ready to run classes, that take
care of the interface (with all the company logos
and standard look-and-feel stuff.)
then wrote some other classes to wrap around the
"CResultView" classes, and finally,
wrote some classes that *know* about our strange
servers, and are optimized for them (including
a connection "language" I derived, which is nothing
more than a hand optimization of the subset of
SQL accepted by oracle.)

So, if the shop is good to you, be good to them
and put your talent to work.
The API method works, and I am a living witness for it.

Re:Fights with managers

[Twylite]

The fact that you aren't prepared to stand up to your manager is the first sign of a problem. You have to make management understand that you are (I assume) a professional. Development or (hopefully) software engineering is your career, for which you are educated, and that in such areas management does NOT have the required knowledge to act.

In no other technical profession can management dictate HOW the job should be achieved. They can set budgets and deadlines, and assist in planning, but they do not have the liberty to force a domain expert to act in a certain way.

This needs to be made more clear to software managers. Software is difficult to write and to maintain. Even though most contracts seem watertight, there is an element of liability implicit in the sale of custom-developed software, which makes YOUR organisation responsible. And as the software engineer someone is going to shit on YOUR head when things go wrong ... not the manager's.