Many programs have a need to store program state to disk at various points. An approach used by many of these programs is to serialize the objects representing the program state directly to disk (or a database). Back in 2004 (XML-Serialized Objects and Coupling), I described a coupling problem caused by automatically serializing objects to… Read More »
This is the next in a series of posts refuting some recurring claims about the death of SVG, In the first post, I gave a brief overview of SVG. Each subsequent post takes a claim and refutes it. The Claim SVG is useless because it doesn’t support even basic 3D features This claim makes a… Read More »
I was reading The JavaScript Phrasebook on Safari and ran across one of my favorite pet peeves when people write about Web technologies. Cookies are not a specific browser technology, but a mechanism in the client/server model to overcome one major shortcoming in the HTTP protocol. HTTP is stateless, which means that the protocol does… Read More »
Several times in the last few years, I have written about the subject of memory management, garbage collection, and object lifetime. Some of essays I’ve written on this subject include: The Semantics of Garbage Collection More Thoughts on Resource Recovery Other Resource Recovery Approaches Resource Management Revisited Recently, I was thinking about this issue again… Read More »
Back in September, Mark Dominus wrote a commentary describing his take on Design Patterns. Although I am impressed with a lot of what MJD has written in the past, I wasn’t sure what to make of this one. Ralph Johnson of Design Patterns fame responded and MJD wrote again. I encourage you to read all… Read More »
One of the things Java programmers seem to really like to hate in C++ is the concept of operator overloading. I have heard this from many Java programmers and seen it written by others. According to many, operator overloading makes C++ impossible to understand because you can’t tell what a piece of code is doing… Read More »
Back in September, I talked a bit about The One, Right Place and what a useful concept it is. I’m now reading the second edition of Code Complete and ran across this concept once again. More importantly, McConnell references the book where I first read about the concept: Programming on Purpose: Essays on Software Design.… Read More »
When talking about Object Oriented Programming, there are several principles that are normally associated with the paradigm: polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. I feel that people tend to forget the first, most important principle of OOP: object lifetime. One of the first things that struck me when I was learning OOP in the C++ programming language… Read More »
I had an interesting thought during an email conversation with a friend yesterday. One problem many people have when using XML for data is a misunderstanding of what the XML is. (If you don’t believe in the data in XML approach, feel free to ignore me.<grin/>) It’s easy to make the mistake of treating the… Read More »
Although the debate continues to rage between the XML as documents camp and the XML as data camp, it seems reasonable to believe that both styles are here to stay. I have noticed one trend in XML data that strikes me as déjà vu all over again. There seem to be a large number of… Read More »