Chris Donnan

I am moving my blog....

chrisdonnan — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 21:14:00 GMT

I am moving my blog to chrisdonnan.com.

My domain
More flexability
Wiki....
etc

:)

Ruby.... The dynamic language debate continued

chrisdonnan — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 14:07:00 GMT

So.... I spend most of my day typing C# code for the past several years. This is of course not to mention running dev teams to 'get the job done', being a husband, dad, etc. I also spend time writing Java code, Ruby code, when I need to - C++, etc, etc - i will spare the list. That all said - there is so much debate lately regarding dynamic vs static typing.... I think that there are some missed points in these debates as I have been experiencing while writing my C# to Java converter (lets call it Hydrogue).

Many of the 'debates' regarding static vs dyamic typing seem to have left out much of what my experience tells me are key differentiators. Most of the dynamic language fans say:

"Type errors are such a small part of the error spectrum - why be burdned by type constraints???. Focus on unit tests." Sounds good - take away the 'constraints' of strong typing.

But:

Dynamic languages force you to know the implementation - or the type expected - how about that! This is the biggie in my mind. BREAKS ENCAPSULATION/ INFORMATION HIDING.
When data modeling - I WANT to know the types/ subtypes etc of aggregate objects (see 1st bullet too - I must go look around to see the 'interface' of an object/ sub-object)
Tools have a hard time helping

Refactoring support
Intellisense like support

"Duck typing is fine" - but it does NOT help me when I need to expect certain 'interfaces' will be passed into a routine. (related to bullets 1,2)

The worst of all of these has been point 1. Without knowing types of objects - I am constantly having to run around and look at routines innards to see what methods they will be calling on my objects I pass to them. If I pass an interface reference - this is effectively saying - you can call only these things on me - and I expect it. With out this notion - I need to go look inside and see what the client class will call.... thus breaking down encapsulation.

It is hopeful/ possible/ likely that a dynamic language IDE will support statement completion (Ruby Eclipse does MINIMALLY). When this happens - it will be beyond helpful. I find that even though it is 'more code' I can turn out more code in an automated fashion using IDEs that support refactoring, intellisense, AND INTELLIGENT find usages/ implementors, etc.

That all said - I LIKE Ruby. Writing Hydrogue has been fun, educational and useful. Just pouring over the C# language spec @ msdn has been worth the work as my understanding of the bowels of C# from the inside out have gotten all the more clear. The extra Ruby education has been great - and getting everyday back into Java has been great as well. I will just say that - either IDEs have to get smarter, or I do to be as productive with a dynamically typed language as I am with a strongly typed language.

My thought was, and continues to be - the right language for the right job. I am not convinced (as many others seem to be) that dynamic languages are ready to do the things that C#/ Java do (much less C++). Perhaps I will be more convinced to use Ruby for 'bigger' or 'more complex' applications eventually. I will keep working with Ruby and hopefully by the time the tools catch up - I can contribute to the community of developers that start with them...

Enough;

Chris

Fisheye - cool tool for watching your SCM repository growth

chrisdonnan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:20:00 GMT

I have been a using fan of DevMetrics for some time now (since it came out I believe). That being said - we have been using CruiseControl to do daily and checkin builds. We have been chatting about using NAnt tasks to keep historical copies of the DevMetrics reports so we could watch the codebase over time.....

LO AND BEHOLD :

FishEye

For example:

Spring.net in FishEye action.

and:

The 'real' spring framework (lol) in FishEye action.

Unfortunately they are 'working on' support for Perforce and ClearCase... Sooner than later we hope!

Filter by user, show for directory, show diffs, etc, etc...

-Chris

C# and Java Generics .... Covariance ....

chrisdonnan — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:46:00 GMT

The Java case:

The C# case:

Painful - but generics are not covariant in either case - meaning ....

(Java - from above link)

    List<Integer> li = new ArrayList<Integer>();
    List<Number> ln = li; // illegal

(C# from above link)

    // create new List<Base>
    List<Base> baseArray = new List<Base>();

    // create new List<Derived>
    List<Derived> derivedArray = new List<Derived>(); 

    // CANNOT assign List<Derived> to List<Base>

    List<Base> baseArray2 = derivedArray;      // compiler error here

I am getting into using generics for non-trivial circumstances now. I am implementing generic classes - not just using the List<T> stuff anymore. Now that I am getting down to it - as always - it is an art :)

Developing User Interfaces.....

chrisdonnan — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:42:00 GMT

Inspired by an article linked @ SlashDot ...

I got to thinking about developing software for end users, as I often do....

My current project is a desktop credit derivatives trading application that ~900 users globally use (not too many I realize - but enough to be interesting). When I 1st came on the project the 1st thing that struck me was how poorly designed the user interfaces was - it was NOT apparent how to use it at all. We did have the opportunity to work on that... I have spent the recent time working on a new 'trade blotter' and general UI application architecture. One of my primary goals is, and will continue to be - making the UI feel like home to the end users. Making the UI really support the habbits, quirks and needs of the end user in a way that is not just 'some fluff atop the "real" program'. The UI is the real program as far as a user goes. All the nice 'backend processing' in the world is great - 100% needed, but the UI is where you can get strong percieved wins from your end users.
Here are a few links for those folks that want to keep up on UI design practices and patterns. So many software developers consider the UI tier to be the fluff part that means the least. Unfortunately - the users (that pay for the development generally) think the opposite :)

welie.com
designinginterfaces.com (book site with refs)
Sari Laakso's patterns
..newer Yahoo!s UI patterns site

I will also mention that after a few years of doing larger class desktop application/ smart client development - I have seen the same issues and constructs come up over and over. 2 frameworks abstract smart client/ rich client/ desktop applications extremely well.

The 1st is the latest Microsoft CAB (Composite UI Application Block). This specifies excellent abstractions for common rich client application needs. When I was going over the internals - again and again I found myself saying 'yes - we did that too' or 'wow - we solved that issue differently - you guys did it better!'. I will also note the Infragistics 2006.1 works directly with the CAB. Excellent move on their behalf!

The other is the Eclipse RCP (Rich client platform). I have been really studying out the guts of eclipse - the RCP in particular (while reading - The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse, 2nd Edition). What an excellent set of APIs these folks have come up with. The plugin architecture and the notion of 'contribution based extension' are particularly excellent.

-Chris

useful programming 'quick references' for several languages

chrisdonnan — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 05:50:00 GMT

useful programming 'quick references' for several languages.... If you jump into perl 1x per year - or the same for MFC, or the same for using VI, admin commands for solaris, and many more - this is for you :) -Chris

What this fellow calls the 'Executable Internet', and some mags...

chrisdonnan — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 20:12:00 GMT

More on what this fellow calls the Executable Internet. This is along the lines of what I have been talking about in earlier posts - Xaml and the beginning of the 'computer as the browser'...

I also mentioned that I would post the mags/journals that I usually read:

MSDN Magazine
Linux Magazine
Visual Studio Magazine
JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL
Software Development
DDJ - Doctor Dobb's Journal
C/C++ Users Journal
Evolutionary Computation - The MIT Press
IEEE -- Computer Magazine

Rich Internet Application - akin to my prior post...

chrisdonnan — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 18:37:00 GMT

Rich Internet Application post

Someone else talking about post-browser apps. He is more focused on talking about 'social networks', 'FOAF', 'Tagging' and (_so_called_) Web 2.0-ish stuff. My point in refereing this is - the post-browser era is coming....

-CD

Musings on Xaml, Expressions, Virtual Machines, OS's, Computing Resources

chrisdonnan — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 04:38:00 GMT

Some free form thoughts:

For a long time - I have thought that the web browser was interesting. It is a fairly primitive set of UI components that you can declaratively ask to be rendered - via HTML/ CSS (for the most part). You also have the option of interactively programming to the browser's API - mostly in JavaScript. The powerful part was/ is that you are sending text across the wire from 1 machine to the next - declaring to the browser what to do.....

So - the issue is/ has been that the browser experience is not as 'rich' as a desktop application ... AJAX - SchmaeJax - I know... but it is not as rich - period. Oh sure - there have been valiant efforts - Flash, Mozilla's XUL, etc - but in essence, but still - we are declaring our intent to a web browser - an application of limited scope - inside a much more complete operating system....

The next step is to do the much same thing - send declarative intent - over the wire - BUT:

1) To a richer rendering engine (the web browser in browser era)
2) With a richer programmable API (the DOM API / browser API in browser era)
3) With more robust programming language possibilities (JavaScript in browser era)

So - we send declarative intent to - the OS. This is accomplished with an extensible markup language that can reach into more domains than HTML did/ can. HTML is a limited domain markup language. One XML document can contain multiple over-layed namespaces of information that can be consumed in differently by different aspects of the interpreting application.

If the browser is just a subset of the computer's (OS's) functionality that can have it's behavior invoked/ declared, the end of that chain of logic is that the OS should just allow it directly - the superset of functionality. With XAML - Microsoft brings some of this to the table.

1) richer rendering engine (the OS - WPF, Expressions stuff, GDI, etc. in the post-browser era)
2) richer programmable API (.Net framework in the post-browser era)
3) robust programming language possibilities (C#, Vb.Net, etc.)

Granted - security will need to be of central importance in this scenario - where the OS can be so controlled- but that aside - this is the logical step. I do not question this progression happening the question is - what other vendor(s), OS's, etc. will support this type of idea? Maybe something like:

1) richer rendering engine (Linux with some core rendering engine .... SVG based perhaps)
2) richer programmable API (KDE, QT, more abstraction of the raw Linux functionality from elsewhere)
3) robust programming language possibilities (Java, Ruby, Something else...)

Interesting - I admit - these are fairly off the cuff thoughts, you never know what will happen.

What Microsoft is doing with Expressions and that realm of stuff is also part of the next generation of application development – breaking away from the classic looking application. Flash is a beautiful looking thing in browser world. It is still limited. An application with the full power of your computer looking like a flash application could – will be a lovely thing. Making 3d user interfaces will become real soon. Making really animated – lush applications will be real soon. In this space – an SVG player may come into play.

A Windows Virtual Machine?? I wonder if at some point – computing resources (hard drives, memory, etc) will be so commoditized that all OS's will basically be able to simply access a sort of grid of resources.... Then all “OS's” will be something like a virtual machine atop generic resources. They are then just set of APIs for accessing truly common resources and abstracting functionality into a software computer. The resources are the same – the abstraction on top of them – the software is what is worthy to developers. Java was a better abstraction of the computer resources than C APIs (in my way of thinking) for non-primitive operations. C# is even a slightly better set of abstractions (delegates, events, etc are really better than Java – I am sorry. I DO love Java – I am just being honest). Anyhow - it is really not too far fetched to envision Windows or something from MS as being a portable Virtual Machine that could run like a JVM etc.... anyhow.........

Anyhow – I have rambled..
-Chris

Mono build running in no time

chrisdonnan — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:03:00 GMT

Well - I was able to EASILY take the portable part of my optimzation and classification software - import the projects into the latest MonoDevelop (v0.9), add a reference to db4o - and it built immediately. There you have it c#/ .Net, Linux (Suse10) working just like that.

The intellisense looks nice and works well - Again - I am spoiled by IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse that offer real refactoring support etc (natively or via plug ins at least). Still - not bad. It is too bad that I will not be able to port over the LOTS of UI code. Infragistics, TeeChart, lots more will just not be easily run on a nix machine.

Latest pet project

chrisdonnan — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 05:37:00 GMT

So - I spent the better part of 2 years writing a distributed Optimization and Classification application for use training fully automated trading systems - sometimes you hear me reference OptimalOptimizer - that is what i am refering to. In short - it is software - written in C# that implements much learned for the schools of Memetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Computation, Data Mining, etc, etc. Cool bits with useful purpose. A user recently messaged me to say that he believes it has harvested near 100 tradeable trading systems with near 1000 possible variations of those systems!

Anyhow... To brush up on my Java skills - and to play with Ruby - I have been working on a C# to Java converter - written in Ruby. (I am also upgrading the C# code to use 2.0 features - mainly generics - but that is besides the point).

I am working on strategies for converting the following C# items to Java:

#        package/ namespace
#        events
#        delegates
#        using
#        regions
#        assertions
#        exceptions
#         attributes
#         get/set
#        foreach
#         constructor overloading
#        extends (base classes)
#         implements (interfaces)

I am sure this list will expand...

This set of exercises has shown me several things so far - so - in no particular order.

1) Delegates/ Events are wonderful
2) Java's notion of events is far inferior
3) Qt's SLOTS/ SIGNALS is better than Java's event mechanisms in many ways
4) Delegates/ Events are better than Qt's SLOTS/ SIGNALS
5) Ruby is a cool little language
6) I am very reliant on IDEs, strong typing etc - getting used to getting much less from the IDE is a hard exercise (Ruby in Eclipse)
7) Ruby and Qt's Ruby Extensions are nice in thought - not so great to use (yet maybe)
8) Porting .Net 1.1 to the latest 1.5 JDK is easier than older JDK versions - annotations help a ton as I am usually an attribute zealot in .net land
9) I keep learning this lesson - Db4o is wonderful
10) I need an open source message queue (perhaps ActiveMQ + Stomp for DotNet seems most compelling )
11) It is late and I need to go to bed.
12) My kids are really cute - I wish the slept perfectly :)

OK - so some of those are not lessons from this process - but they are true nonetheless

-Chris

db4o rocks

chrisdonnan — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 04:03:00 GMT

Db4o is just plain good technology.

Db4o is an open source [caveats] object database for Java and/ or .Net. It is purposeful, cool, fun, impressive, well coded - all sorts of good.

Dr Dobbs Journal. I did some work with Db4oaround 6 months ago and was quite impressed with it in general. That being said - there are a few just amazing points about db4o:

1) I persist my C# object and it can be re-hydrated in a Java client or a .Net client ....
2) Native queries are amazing - especially with anon-delegates in .Net 2.0 - they look like...
3) You can easily refresh in memory objects to get updated changes from other objects out there in the DB.
4) Many lovely query mechanisms.
5) Now - they have Hibernate based replication between relational DBs and the object db ( or multiple object DBs).

Anon-Delegates look like this:

delegate(Student student){
  return student.Age < 20
    && student.Name.Contains("f");
}

You are simply telling the object DB that you want a 'Student' with a certain 'where clause'. The primary difference is that you are using ... the native language - not some stringy SQL code.

Anyhow - enough for db4o - when I can get back to really using it - I will update.

-Chris

Dev machine software/ tools

chrisdonnan — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 14:05:00 GMT

Someone at the office was asking about the melange of tools I have installed on my machine - admittedly I am a tool/ software addict....

What I have on my current project’s machine (win2k….. man) (at least this stuff - and plenty more of lesser note)

VS .Net 2003

Resharper

devMetrics

GhostDoc AddIn

Regions AddIn

Xsd Object Generator

VSWindowManager AddIn

Spring.net

CodeSmith

NDoc

RegexDesigner.NET

CruiseControl.NET

CCTray

NUnit

FxCop

Textpad

Reflector

XmlSpy

Eclipse

Log4net

Infragistics 5.3

Rapid SQL

ClearCase(hatred!!!)

ClearQuest (hatred!!!)

Tomcat

Snippet Compiler

Rhino.Mocks

Simian

Solvent VS.Net Add In

CopySourceAsHtml VS.Net Add In

Things that when they do not kill my machine I keep installed at my current project

Compuware DevPartner

What I add on other machines as must haves (Windows Server 2k3 @ Home, some XP Pro @ Home) (at least this stuff, along with the above list for the most part - and more of lesser note)

VS.Net 2005

SQL Server 2005

Eclipse Ruby

Tomcat

Axis

Spring (for Java)

Ruby

Omea Reader

Subversion

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseCVS

Apex SQL Edit

SQL Server 2000

Microsoft CAB 2.0

Linux Machine must haves (Current Suse 10)

KDevelop

KDevelop Ruby

Eclipse

MonoDevelop

Subversion

Thunderbird

Firefox

Krdc

Akregator

EditpadPro

Butterfly XML

I could go on - but I am back to work.