I was reading these days about large projects implementation in python and Flex, and very often people praise the use of framework (like Cairngorm, PureMVC or others) over traditional OOP coding.
I think i dont really understand the advantage of using FW, which is the strong point over classic programming? how big should be the project in order to use FW? it is intended mainly for web-applications? or can be used for desktop apps as well?
hope, all these doubts dont sound stupid to you, i am not Computer engineer, just electronic, so my knowledge of sw architecture is very limited.
Br
Using a framework is not really any different from classic OOP programming.
When you write projects in a similar environment, you will probably see yourself writing a framework (or a set of tools) over and over again.
A framework is really just code reuse - instead of you writing the logic for managing a common task, someone else (or you) has written it already for you to use in your project.
A well designed framework will keep you focused on your task, rather than spending time solving problems that has been solved already.
I would add my 2 cents here, using a framework will also help a better organized collaborative environment too. Your team mates will get to know about the code easily if you are following a standard framework.
In enterprise applications using framework helps meeting the deadline and better code quiality.
Related
So I'm new to node.js, javascript frameworks, and meteor.com. I'm trying to learn how to build social networks, and I'm naive/struggling to understand why Meteor.js (meteor.com) wouldn't be able to do all the great things you see now that twitter, facebook, instagram are doing?
There's the comet technology between client/server, authentication configs, asynchronous coding for scaling and performance, and built on top of node.js.
I'm trying to learn more about long polling, comet, gridFS or how files are stored, and in general things like replication sets, and sharding to help with performance (esp since Redhat has this openshift platform that we can build our own private clouds with).
I have some computer science background, but it seems like magic, so what am I missing? If you all could think of a few buzz words that make a social network tick that Meteor.js doesn't support, what would it be?
I hear things about parallel and concurrency (webworkers fixes that in part, no?), websockets, that high level languages like python or java are better off supporting. There's only one to learn my answers, and thats by doing, but thought someone could sway me one way or the other via this thread. Thanks!
This question encompasses a really broad idea and just focusing on using meteor alone would solve this issue. Here are a few points to consider:
I don't think this framework would be a good starting point to learn long-polling, gridFS, etc etc. Meteor aims to be a framework that tends to be more of an ecosystem of packages e.g. you can certainly roll your own aformentioned strategies -- however for dynamic updates, Meteor uses its own Data Delivery Protocol (DDP) supported/implemented by (surprise) a good bunch of core packages such as Spark.
Parallel processing and concurrency can be better off done using other languages, but why not with? Since Meteor is largely based on node.js, and node.js is really good with the aforementioned stuff plus it can play very well with other languages so you could integrate smoothly. Meteor doesn't really require you purely rely on it, as other languages would say the same thing. It's all in the general engineering / planning for your project. There are already lots of really good stuff out there that rely on Meteor, join in! don't be afraid. It all boils down to planning (and the courage/perseverance to pull it off, of course).
Right now, we cannot tell if Meteor would be incapable of the usual great stuff by gigantic websites. Sure, we can do live updates, (its own kind of) publish/subscribe patterns, and powerful stuff to boost development (look at the seven core concepts of meteor to best understand this). It is not impossible to replicate what is already out there, really. We can only say it with uncertainty at the moment mainly because.. (see next point)
The framework is so young! it's still at 0.6.x at the time of writing. Please take time to look at the Meteor Roadmap to see how things are going in terms of broader support for persistence/databases, performance considerations, and the official DDP specification.
I hope I have answered your enquiry (and more, I hope). I'm really excited for meteor myself as it could easily be the next big thing. We have a couple of (for-)production projects using Meteor as well, so you're getting direct insight from a person who has done quite a bit of hacking (and tons of research and first-hand experience) in Meteor. Not that i'm saying i'm an expert or so, it's just so much fun to work with Meteor and i'm totally not kidding you.
Hope this helps!
P.S.: Fair warning though, resources and documentation is really sparse at this point. I try to contribute to the community as much as I can about it (one of my starting points is here, on SO).
I want to throw together a .net website as an interface to a subsystem I manage.
I'm planning to use ASP.net (on .net 2.0) because this is the shop's standard.
I would like to use an ORM because I was playing with Django a little bit ago and realize the time saver and code simplifier it was. I realize I may not get the time saving aspect because of the setup but I think it should make maintenance easier.
Can someone recommend a stable, very easy to learn/setup ORM product that works with ASP.NET 2.0. I prefer open source, but as long as the product is free it's fine.
Because learning something is dependent on the learner I want to share that I'm an experienced developer. I use a lot of languages and generally learn quickly with good material.
I'd recommend Castle Active Record.
It's built ontop of NHibernate, which is a pretty popular one, but Castle's AR is faster to get off the ground with in my opinion.
I used it on my last ASP.NET project so can vouch for usefulness there. :)
Edit - Here's a quick link to "Getting started".
I recommend NHibernate. It is full featured, very mature and (in my experience) quite stable. Take a look at the summer of nhibernate screencasts (also free) and you'll have enough knowledge to get up and running in no time!
Has anyone actually built and deployed a website with IronPython and ASP.NET. What were your experiences and is the combination ready for prime-time?
I asked this question just over a year ago. And the consensus seemed to be "not really".
What's the status now?
I haven't actually ever tried it, however I do know there's a library available which allows you to write inline python in your ASP.NET.
It would seem to me that this is very usable in a production scenario.
Gestalt
I believe that if you want to do anthing useful/em> with .NET + IronPython, you need better support for the dynamicy of Microsoft's CLR environment, and you'll need VS2010 for that.
You may have better luck just building a strait up python app. Why bother using ASP.NET? Are you integrating with another codebase?
I don't believe that ASP.NET was ever ready for prime time. The framework is contrived and an awful fit for designing web applications. It was made for VB6 programmers that only know how to drag controls onto a design surface.
Most decent(and pretty much all bad) applications written on ASP.NET don't use it as it was designed, and if that's the case then what's the point.
I am developing applications for 9 years now - meanly Java. Now am asked to participate in the SVT team for the next release. Overall this means installing complex system setups and running specific user scenarios on these setups as well as doing long runs and load runs.
Overall I am positive about it as I will learn something new. But I am also affraid to loose some grip and knowledge with programming, because of not doing it a lot then.
I know doing programming in side projects such as helping with open source projects will be one alternative, but finding the time on top of a familiy life and a fulltime jop is not that easy.
What do you think, is doing concrete testing work helping getting a better software engineer?
Thanks in advance,
Michael
Testing isn't asside of programming.
You can still program automated systems so you can have recursion testing. From unit tests to real complex automated systems, the best i know is selenium which generates code you can use to build testing scripts in most languages.
There are other tools for non webapps. But I personaly believe that testing is a bit far away from "stoping coding. Unless you're just doing user point-of-view testing.
You can also do error injections which will make you write small singletons to inject them in the memory of your application.
So you can code while testing ;) and learn new stuff also.
Having been in a testing team i think it really helps, because you'll learn to exploit code easily, which will reflect when you build your own API or App at a later date.
I would say it depends on your skill and temparament. Programming knowledge will serve you well while testing. At the same time, I know that it needs a different approach and mindset and is on a completely different career track. You can always keep up your programming skills by writing code for a project you like (even if you have to make one up).
One of the stated goals of the PureMVC framework is to avoid platform dependencies in order to be portable. Considering that because of language and API differences application code will always be heavily dependent on the platform, and that avoiding platform dependencies makes the framework reinvent the wheel and/or only provide a least-common-denominator feature set, in what way does the portability of the framework benefit me as an application developer?
I've worked with PureMVC. They're trying to implement their stuff in quite a lot of languages. You may be right about the least common denominator, but overall, it's not a bad framework, and I've seen a really nice AS3 app in PureMVC.
I don't think they're talking about portability in terms of porting actual code. The idea there is more that you're using a generalized MVC architecture, which you could apply to other projects and other languages.
They're trying to say that if you become familiar with the PureMVC pattern, you could potentially come into a new PureMVC codebase, even if it's another language, and you would already know the lay of the land.
You might also say that developers who develop good PureMVC skills are likely to develop good habits which will translate as they go from language to language. But then again, maybe not.. for the reasons you mentioned.
We've been using PureMVC on two projects now and in my opinion the attempted language-independence is quite a burden.
The promise of jumping straight in a project because the framework is already know does not seem relevant to me if the languages are not already pretty similar (C# to java would make sense, as3 to php not) -- I agree that it is useful to have known ways of solving things, but for that the 'plain' patterns are good enough.
However, I also don't really agree with the usage of the various patterns the project uses, so our choice to not use it on the next project might be related to both issues, and not just the attempt at language/platform independence.
PureMVC's portability will help you when you migrate to or reimplement in another language.
I can't count the number of platforms and languages I've written code for that are now extinct and for which, even if I still had the source code it would be mostly worthless and have to be rewritten from the ground up today, since the code was usually 100% platform specific.
But all application code need not be heavily dependent upon the platform. View components and services (the boundaries of your application) will necessarily be, but your application logic which is sandwiched between the boundaries need not be.
The scope of PureMVC is really quite narrow; merely to help you split your code into the three tiers proscribed by the MVC meta-pattern. There is no reason why this code has to be tied deeply to your platform in order to be optimal.
When it comes time to migrate, you'll appreciate that the framework actors and their roles, responsibilities and collaborations remain the same. This leaves you to deal with syntactic differences of the language, recreating the view components and services. At least you won't have to completely re-architect.
And for the case of reimplementing in a different language, imagine you're trying to capture a significant part of the mobile market with your app. The market is so fractured, you'll have to implement the same program on 2 or more of Windows Mobile, iPhone, Flash, and Java. Sure you'll probably have separate teams in charge of the apps, but why have a totally different architecture? With PureMVC, you could have a single architecture for all versions of your application.
-=Cliff>
PureMVC is the only real option for Flash Platform developers who choose not to use the Flex Framework. For certain projects the size cost of Flex is too expensive (it happens!).
I like to prototype in Flex and then rip it out and replace my views with custom components when the application is near completion. PureMVC makes this really easy to do with it's Mediator pattern. I'm not sure there is any other framework that would allow me this workflow.
Personally, I think PureMVC went too far with it's portability goals: I enjoy that fact that it works with Flash AND Flex (for the reasons mentioned above), but feel that it should have stopped there, and made use of the native Flash Player event architecture.
Are there examples of people using PureMVC to build and port applications across multiple platforms?
My company is building a Flex application that we may need to port to other platforms:
Silverlight (likely)
Mobile (maybe)
Desktop (maybe -- not just AIR!)
TV sets (maybe eventually)
I am considering PureMVC as a framework if it can ease porting and maintenance. I am curious to know if other people have ported a PureMVC app to a different platform and what their experience was with porting and then having development proceed in parallel for the app on multiple platforms.
Cheers,
Karthik
PureMVC does not rely on a platform for its internal workings (Flash Events etc).
So, while it does not make porting any easier per-say, it can assist simply by showing us its friendly and familiar face wherever we may choose to go ;-)