Software, Business, and Life
May 28 2001
In any development project, there are well-known risks: Risk that the scope will be underestimated at the start Risk that the scope will increase over time (not always a bad thing - often a client discovers that additional functionality would deliver additional business value) Risk that the development firm will be unable to deliver any working solution [...]
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May 10 2001
There has been a lot of buzz recently about "Web Services". A short examination shows that essentially a web services is an RPC (remote procedure call), generally across the internet, using SOAP/XML over HTTP. RPCs are nothing new – so why all the excitement? Here are some reasons: Web services work over the internet, through [...]
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May 01 2001
Here are some notes from my early XP investigation: Extreme Programming (commonly called “XP”, an unfortunately overloaded acryonym with Microsoft’s impending release of Windows XP) is a relatively new, lightweight method for software development. I have been applying XP practices in recent projects with excellent results. There are a number of excellent web sites about [...]
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May 01 2001
Here is a common situation where refactoring can be used: Problem: You have a body of code which exposes and API (set of entry points). You want this code to have a different API. Non-refactoring based solution: Take the old code apart. From the pieces, write new code that has the desired API. The problem [...]
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May 01 2001
Design Patterns, Gamma et al. I have purchased and read several other books on this topic, including language-specific books and longer books. I still like this one best. Programming Perl, Wall, Christiansen, and Orwant. The "camel book" is a clear and concise book about a perhaps unclear but very concise language. UML Distilled, Martin Fowler, [...]
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May 01 2001
(This introductory article was written in 2001 to help explain to clients why LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL) were chosen as the infrastructure for for certain kinds of web sites. We generally choose other tools now.) Many of our dynamic web sites are built using PHP and MySQL. Although these products are frequently used [...]
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