"He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good"
-- John Donne, Resurrection, Imperfect
- Business Process Analysis
- Java
Take a look at what are some of the key elements of Java -- the things that most enable itkto solve problems.
- Exceptions
- Garbage collection and memory management
- Interfaces
- Object oriented
- Threads
- GUI
- Built-in networking support
- Strong typing and specified widening/casting
- extensively specified operator precedence/evaluation order
- Extensive libraries included as part of the language
- cross-platform portability
Those are the pieces of Java that the designers and programmers build on, and the elements that will carry through for as long as the language is popular. Now what kinds of problems does this toolkit solve best? The development of the so-called 'Enterprise APIs' is a good demonstration of these strengths. The vigor with which IBM is promoting Java across all its platforms and the number of server-side uses is another indicator.
What could be cooler that writing in say, a page of code, a program that can put up a UI, spawn a thread to open a network connection and retrieve a document over it while continuing to interact with the user, and finally display the resulting document with formatted text?
- Object Oriented Analysis and Design
- Object-Relational Mapping
- http://www.ambysoft.com/persistenceLayer.html
- http://www.ambysoft.com/mappingObjects.html
- http://www.ksccary.com/Articles/PatternLangForRelationalDB/PatternLangForRelationalDB.htm
- http://www.objectmatter.com/vbsf/docs/maptool/ormapping.html
- Personal Software Process
A certain way to create crisis is to not have a schedule, other than a customer delivery "go live" date, and to have no measurements and no checkpoints in place to determine at any point whether or not the project is on schedule. The manager can then declare the project "running late" at any point, creating crisis, or perhaps more commonly, to no know the project is late or not until it is clear to even the most junior coder that the project is behind. At this point of course, the project will never be able to make the original delivery date, even if that date was achievable. Instant crisis, don't even have to add water. The Personal Software Process is partly about software engineers learning how they do things and how long it takes them, allowing them to give reasonable and reliable estimates for the development cycle. It is also about measuring progress, allowing everyone to know whether the project is on schedule or not and why.
- Web Application Development, including XML