Ground Realities
on
UML Fever
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
All the so called goodies of UML asides, the fact is lot of projects have a very tight schedule and overlook lot of potential pitfalls.
When these overlooked potential pitfalls, start to pust the project dates further and further away, the entire s/w development cycle is compromised and lot of design work is bypassed. Most of the functionality is directly coded from the requirement specs, bypassing all the UML stuff.
And there is the issue of Change management, Over the lifetime of a project , lot of staff changes including developers and designers, and the documentation and UML stuff starts to lag behind the current implementations. There comes a time when the UML diagrams represention is no where near the current functionality of the Code.
Having worked on two very long maintainace projects for very rich clients , I can tell you that initial project delivery is only the tip of the ice burgh. The real deal is maintaining and upgrading the project over a long time, and sadly UML is very inadequate for that.
From a developer's POV , who needs to work on someone else's code,Nothing and really Nothing is as useful as proper comments in a code.
Some of the Screen shots are of Small portions of the screen, enlarged using a Magnifier. It's not lack of anti aliasing that makes them look that way, it's just magnificaton of 4x or greater .
Why is this moded Insightful ?
The parent poster has no idea what fair use means, Fair use Does NOT mean , taking someone's product and using it for commercial gain. Fair use means the ability to make backups and multiple copies for strict personal (your self and family) use only.
Now If I take a GPLed program, tweak it to my tastes and use it on my own PC, without submitting back the changes, it is NOT a violation of GPL.
But on the other hand I make a commerical closed source product using a GPLed code written by someone else and sell it that is a blatant violation of GPL, much like if someone were to use Fairplay to decrypt the aac files bought from iTunes and play them at a club or a bar.
The saddest effect of DMCA is that people no longer understand what fair use means. Next thing you know, there would be laws against having your earphone volumes too loud, less someone sitting next to you might hear the music.
My personal favourite for HTTP based traffic is OpenSTA.
Open source, and very flexible, what more it even supports https and you can actully see the https traffic. It can be scripted and automated to run on a cluster for stress testing your web application. Provides CVS results and also graphs
My only gripe are , no proper support for SSL client authentication via digital certificates, and sometimes complex URL created via Javascripts can be a problem in SSL.
I can second that, Net 4.78 crashes everytime on solaris, while Mozilla / fireXXX are stable literally for months.
The only time I close my firebird on solaris is when I log out every 4-5 months. My log-in session becomes slightly sluggish after about 4-5 months, so I log out and log back in. But apart from that firefox remains up for all the time.
And here I am , with my copy of firebird 0.7 on solaris , which runs for literally months with out crashing.
I have installed the browser uptime extension and every time someone, mentions how stable XP is, All I do is show them my browser up time, arguments stop.
I have firebird 0.7 on solaris, firefox 0.8 on Windows ME (yes the dreaded ME) and firefox , CVS build on gentoo linux and none has crashed on me so far.
I did have stability problems with fireXXX
What's more even my roommate has now switched to firefox, and this is the fellow who ran to buy the Win XP upgrade on the very first day it was released.
I am sick of all these "attitudes like this " posts..
Let's face it , most proprietory products that you speak of are none easier to use than linux products.
I know countless relatives who tried to learn MS word , and got so fed up with all the stupidities, that they went back to wordstar or wordperfect or what ever they were comfortable with.
The point being, it's not a question of attitude of the linux community that's holding back linux's adoptaion, but the shear inneartia of having to switch.
To illustrate the point better, let me give you an example, yesterday I was being tailgated by a bmw, the driver was driving very strangly and I thought he was drunk, So moved to a slow lane and let him pass, only to notice that it was a 745i. So no matter what the attitude of the BMW dealership that sold him that car, he still has to learn and master the interface, if not , he is just an accident waiting to happen.
If a company is dying the last thing they care is if one of their product survives their legacy. Java is only important to sun as long as it helps them sell licencing fees to J2EE and also their own Java products like SunOne Application Server and not to mention all the Sun hardware.
It is silly to expect someone to do a noble deed just before they are dying, It may happen in movies , hardly in real life. In fact, if Sun and in turn Java were to really struggle to survive in future, Sun would use all in its power to hang on to the last piece of patent it has over java technologies and try to go the SCO way of suing every java shop as a last measure.
It may not be right , but that's the way things will end up . whether Java survives or not is not a decission for all java fans to make, but only Sun's call, Unfair but perfectly legal.
I don't mean to question your knowledge on java, but you definitely have got the java.io.* and java.net.* part wrong.
The JVM specs are the very thing that specify how to implement the underling native code for all the java libraries. Infact if you use java.awt.* and get class not found using a third part JVM implementation, like say kaffee or IBM jikes, etc then it means the JVM implementaition is incomplete and is a mistake by the JVM implementor.
Of course I can't deny that you will get varying results when using different JVMs, the results may include performance problems,
1) (e.g. I think only Sun's JVM maps Java threads to kernel space threads on a multi CPU solaris m/c. I am not aware of any other JVM which does this on any other platform, and thus inturn will definitely take a performance hit in a multi threaded app. as compared to Sun's JVM on Solaris) OR
2 ) Varying look and feel effects for different GUI environments. A combo box may be rendered differently using Sun's JVM as compared to other JVM etc.
But all these are not going to be solved by sun open sourcing its code, because they depend on the underlying hardware and OS platform. If sun is fine tuing its JVm to best run on Solaris, then There is nothing stopping IBM to fintune Jikes from running faster and efficiently on x86 (linux) or their big toys the mainframes.
Why is everyone so hell bent on Sun to open source Java ?
I am not a great fan of Sun , but come on, it's their product and whether they choose to open source it or not, should be their decission. After all isn't that what choice is all about ? If the only choice left is open source , then what choice is it ?
Besides , the java specs are wide open for the world to see and implement . So what's the problem , don't the companies of the likes of IBM, BEA , etc have developers who can code if not any better , atleat on par with sun's java developers ?
Now if by open sourcing , they mean, relinquish the control over Java Specs, then that's a totally different thing. And even to that I don't agree, Sun after all did put in a lot of time and efforts to make Java acceptable in the Corporate world.
Merits and Demerits of Java asides, no one can deny the fact that Java is being used for a lot of business software development. And Corporate world is always more welcoming to Products backed up be business oriented companies than a utopic concept. Don't forget that linux is gaining acceptance in the corporate world , mostly because of the efforts of IBM , rather than the collective RTFM attitude of most kernel developers.
For all those who want Java to be open sourced, or open speced (if there is such a word) , why not divert some of those efforts in creating a cross platform development language, and make it as acceptable in the corporate world as Java. Then the problem will automatically go away.
I second that, nothing teaches you like a job you hate.
In my very first job, I did a rookie mistake of asking for a favour from my boss's boss, instead of asking from my boss.
Result I was assigned a job to stare at a monitor in a vacant room , and note down any messages that scroll on it. (No Seriously).
Withing 2 days I got so fustrated, I started writing my own netowrk code, to fetch the data from message log and send them directly to a printer
I learnt TCP/IP , socket programming, shell scripts , unix internals, IPC (shmem, pipes etc), thread programming) in 6 months.
By the time my boss was no longer angry with me and wanted me to work on some development, I was way ahead in terms of productivity as compared to my other colleagues.
The reason why SQL is incompatible across various vendors, is because they make it so.
Any way there is no standards defined for stored procedures, triggers, OODBMS etc, and even if there were, which vendor whould implement them and risk losing business to another competing products.
Slashdot Mirror
When these overlooked potential pitfalls, start to pust the project dates further and further away, the entire s/w development cycle is compromised and lot of design work is bypassed. Most of the functionality is directly coded from the requirement specs, bypassing all the UML stuff.
And there is the issue of Change management, Over the lifetime of a project , lot of staff changes including developers and designers, and the documentation and UML stuff starts to lag behind the current implementations. There comes a time when the UML diagrams represention is no where near the current functionality of the Code.
Having worked on two very long maintainace projects for very rich clients , I can tell you that initial project delivery is only the tip of the ice burgh. The real deal is maintaining and upgrading the project over a long time, and sadly UML is very inadequate for that.
From a developer's POV , who needs to work on someone else's code ,Nothing and really Nothing is as useful as proper comments in a code.
Some of the Screen shots are of Small portions of the screen, enlarged using a Magnifier. It's not lack of anti aliasing that makes them look that way, it's just magnificaton of 4x or greater .
What do you expect, most of the /.ers are only pretend linux users anyway. They all use XP ,
OSR :- :- First name Mike , last name roatch. :- Hey everyone I am looking for Mike Roatch.
Bart
Moe
Still cracks me up
The parent poster has no idea what fair use means, Fair use Does NOT mean , taking someone's product and using it for commercial gain. Fair use means the ability to make backups and multiple copies for strict personal (your self and family) use only.
Now If I take a GPLed program, tweak it to my tastes and use it on my own PC, without submitting back the changes, it is NOT a violation of GPL.
But on the other hand I make a commerical closed source product using a GPLed code written by someone else and sell it that is a blatant violation of GPL, much like if someone were to use Fairplay to decrypt the aac files bought from iTunes and play them at a club or a bar.
The saddest effect of DMCA is that people no longer understand what fair use means. Next thing you know, there would be laws against having your earphone volumes too loud, less someone sitting next to you might hear the music.
Open source, and very flexible, what more it even supports https and you can actully see the https traffic. It can be scripted and automated to run on a cluster for stress testing your web application. Provides CVS results and also graphs
My only gripe are , no proper support for SSL client authentication via digital certificates, and sometimes complex URL created via Javascripts can be a problem in SSL.
Next time don't be surprized to hear "Fo shizzels"
Umm,, It is much easier to dispute credit card charges, than to try and recover lost cash.
Yes and every time you run the reader, it reenables it.
So I uninstalled Acrobat reader and installed ghostview from ghostscript.
The only time I close my firebird on solaris is when I log out every 4-5 months. My log-in session becomes slightly sluggish after about 4-5 months, so I log out and log back in. But apart from that firefox remains up for all the time.
I have installed the browser uptime extension and every time someone, mentions how stable XP is, All I do is show them my browser up time, arguments stop.
I have firebird 0.7 on solaris, firefox 0.8 on Windows ME (yes the dreaded ME) and firefox , CVS build on gentoo linux and none has crashed on me so far.
I did have stability problems with fireXXX What's more even my roommate has now switched to firefox, and this is the fellow who ran to buy the Win XP upgrade on the very first day it was released.
Let's face it , most proprietory products that you speak of are none easier to use than linux products.
I know countless relatives who tried to learn MS word , and got so fed up with all the stupidities, that they went back to wordstar or wordperfect or what ever they were comfortable with.
The point being, it's not a question of attitude of the linux community that's holding back linux's adoptaion, but the shear inneartia of having to switch.
To illustrate the point better, let me give you an example, yesterday I was being tailgated by a bmw, the driver was driving very strangly and I thought he was drunk, So moved to a slow lane and let him pass, only to notice that it was a 745i. So no matter what the attitude of the BMW dealership that sold him that car, he still has to learn and master the interface, if not , he is just an accident waiting to happen.
Surely this is a generic name that suggest the functionality of the product. besides it's so generic I am sure no one must have thought of using it.
It is silly to expect someone to do a noble deed just before they are dying, It may happen in movies , hardly in real life. In fact, if Sun and in turn Java were to really struggle to survive in future, Sun would use all in its power to hang on to the last piece of patent it has over java technologies and try to go the SCO way of suing every java shop as a last measure .
It may not be right , but that's the way things will end up . whether Java survives or not is not a decission for all java fans to make, but only Sun's call, Unfair but perfectly legal.
It serves Sun no purpose to opensource it.
The JVM specs are the very thing that specify how to implement the underling native code for all the java libraries. Infact if you use java.awt.* and get class not found using a third part JVM implementation, like say kaffee or IBM jikes, etc then it means the JVM implementaition is incomplete and is a mistake by the JVM implementor.
Of course I can't deny that you will get varying results when using different JVMs, the results may include performance problems,
1) (e.g. I think only Sun's JVM maps Java threads to kernel space threads on a multi CPU solaris m/c. I am not aware of any other JVM which does this on any other platform, and thus inturn will definitely take a performance hit in a multi threaded app. as compared to Sun's JVM on Solaris) OR
2 ) Varying look and feel effects for different GUI environments. A combo box may be rendered differently using Sun's JVM as compared to other JVM etc.
But all these are not going to be solved by sun open sourcing its code, because they depend on the underlying hardware and OS platform. If sun is fine tuing its JVm to best run on Solaris, then There is nothing stopping IBM to fintune Jikes from running faster and efficiently on x86 (linux) or their big toys the mainframes.
I am not a great fan of Sun , but come on, it's their product and whether they choose to open source it or not, should be their decission. After all isn't that what choice is all about ?
If the only choice left is open source , then what choice is it ?
Besides , the java specs are wide open for the world to see and implement . So what's the problem , don't the companies of the likes of IBM, BEA , etc have developers who can code if not any better , atleat on par with sun's java developers ?
Now if by open sourcing , they mean, relinquish the control over Java Specs, then that's a totally different thing. And even to that I don't agree, Sun after all did put in a lot of time and efforts to make Java acceptable in the Corporate world.
Merits and Demerits of Java asides, no one can deny the fact that Java is being used for a lot of business software development. And Corporate world is always more welcoming to Products backed up be business oriented companies than a utopic concept. Don't forget that linux is gaining acceptance in the corporate world , mostly because of the efforts of IBM , rather than the collective RTFM attitude of most kernel developers.
For all those who want Java to be open sourced, or open speced (if there is such a word) , why not divert some of those efforts in creating a cross platform development language, and make it as acceptable in the corporate world as Java. Then the problem will automatically go away.
Why those people , who drive like crazy on the roads, drive like so....it's the road stupid, not the driver.
Besides why buy crappy printers like Lexmark
within a year's time. :-)
Argentina
Yes Mods are so stupid. --- P.s.:- Just imagine the irony if someone mods this as troll.
In my very first job, I did a rookie mistake of asking for a favour from my boss's boss, instead of asking from my boss.
Result I was assigned a job to stare at a monitor in a vacant room , and note down any messages that scroll on it. (No Seriously).
Withing 2 days I got so fustrated, I started writing my own netowrk code, to fetch the data from message log and send them directly to a printer
I learnt TCP/IP , socket programming, shell scripts , unix internals, IPC (shmem, pipes etc), thread programming) in 6 months.
By the time my boss was no longer angry with me and wanted me to work on some development, I was way ahead in terms of productivity as compared to my other colleagues.
Why do I get the feeling that, somewhere in some corner of the wolrd, Darl has a very very evil grin on his face.
Any way there is no standards defined for stored procedures, triggers, OODBMS etc, and even if there were, which vendor whould implement them and risk losing business to another competing products.