Been thinking a lot about OO just recently, as you do. A lot of the practices I use get questioned when I demonstrate them, exactly as I would have done had the situation been reversed. Many of the questions are of the form ‘Isn’t this OO for OO’s sake?’, or ‘That seems like a lot of work, couldn’t we just use a Getter?’. What’s interesting is that the question of whether something is a lot of work depends very much on your perspective. I’m fairly lazy (aka. ‘pragmatic’) so I seek to find neat ways of reducing effort, but my perspective is usually a fairly wide one, so I’m usually thinking about ways of reducing effort over the life of a project and not just the code I’m typing at 2.30 on a tuesday. Its often the start of an interesting discussion when stuff I’m doing to reduce effort is queried as too much work. It is also be a hard thing to explain, when it does take demonstrably longer to write some code that doesn’t break encapsulation, as opposed to just adding a Getter. I’ve seen what happens to a system when all the objects in it have had their boundaries eroded by the addition of getters, and I remember wishing that there was another way to do it, which ultimately led me to considering the following approach, which I’ve worded as a ‘challenge’:

• Can you take any class in your system and instantiate it easily in a test harness? -Credit to Michael Feathers for this one.
• Can you write a system where none of the classes have Getters (or public properties in .net)?
• Do all your objects have only one constructor?
• Can you write a system where none of your objects take primitives (including string) as parameters to their public methods?
• Where a class accepts multiple parameters in its constructor, can you write it in such a way that none of them are primitives (or strings)?
• Can you do the above using TDD?

I’m not saying I do all this all the time, but it is a goal I try to keep in mind when developing. As an approach it leads to many more fine grained classes with names like ‘FirstName’, ‘Age’ etc that might otherwise have been represented with strings and ints, but it is a fascinating way to develop, and leads to some very interesting code. For example, lets say I want to take an object and render it out as HTML. Usually I immediately think of adding getters for all the fields that needed to be written. If you’re avoiding getters, then you end up with something more like ‘public void WriteTo(IRenderer)’. Which is also really easy to write a test case for, either with a mock object, or by having the test case implement the interface itself.

My blog has atrophied recently, as I’ve been busy doing stuff which has left me with little time to write about it.

I can’t see any imminent pick up in activity, as I’m due to fly out to the US for several months, in a week’s time. This will be an adventure and I suspect the trend of doing things rather than writing about things will continue.

However, not wishing to totally drop the ball, here are the ideas, topics, cool things etc. that are buzzing around my head at the moment.

• Start a travelog? Can I combine my pending travels and interest in photography with blogmapper’s technology to create a snail trail of my movements linked to photos of the places I go to?
• Staying in touch with friends. iChat AV is compatible with AOL, so I’m planning to get my home pc set up with a webcam so my flatmate and I can chat over the interweb. Finally, a reason to own an iSight.
• Start writing my ‘technical issues I’ve seen on every project I’ve worked on’ magnum opus.
• Camino. Will probably replace Safari as my browser of choice, as Safari occasionally barfs and gets into infinite loops on sites with complex redirects.
• Write down my crazy idea that Smalltalk could make a comeback if it had a sufficiently credible brand backing it up. Hint: Apple
• Keep a close eye on WordPress as a potential competitor to Moveable Type

Mapblogging: http://www.blogmapper.com/

EXIF, IPTC, Dublin-core, huh?

• http://www.exif.org/
• IPTC
• http://photoalbum.backtalk.com/
• http://cornwall.backtalk.com/
• http://www.portfoliofaq.com/pfaq/index.html
• http://www.iview-multimedia.com/blog/weblog.php
• http://www.iview-multimedia.com
• http://www.camerabits.com/
• http://www.hugsan.com/EXIFutils/
• http://brainoff.com/worldkit/
• http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/

Finally got around to reading this paper about crash-only software. What a great idea. Given that fatal errors that require a component be restarted are by their nature unanticipated and almost impossible to design out, why not make crash/reboot the default mode of operation? If a system is designed to be safely arbitrarily crashed and restarted, then the number of fail/recovery scenarios is reduced to one.

The paper takes a number of good ideas for building robust distributed systems, and turns them up to 11. Go read it.

One of my colleagues, Steve, spoke to me the other day about using SMTP for application integration.

Its something that I’ve thought about from time to time, and it just seems to make sense. Here is a protocol that has been around for years, is battle-tested, and is used by millions of systems all over the world to reliably transfer messages. In case you haven’t guessed yet, SMTP is the protocol used for email. Why spend a fortune on enterprise message brokers, when you could download exim or postfix (or sendmail if you’re a masochist). Most linux, BSD or unix boxes will probably have one of these installed already.

SMTP is point to point, so what if we want pub-sub? Handily, there is a protocol called NNTP which has been around about as long as SMTP. This is the protocol that USENET (aka newsgroups) uses.

I definitely think that there is much our industry could learn from technologies invented 20 or more years ago.

http://www.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/crashonly/crashonly.html

http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/loose-coupling-leads-to-robustness/view

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=45621

Michael Feathers tells it like it is:

You think your design is good? Pick a class, any class, and try to instantiate it in a test harness. I used to think that my earlier designs were good until I started to apply that test. We can talk about coupling and encapsulation and all those nice pretty things, but put your money where your mouth is.

Just read a Byte article dating back to 1995 that predicted that Constraint Logic Programming in Prolog would be the programming paradigm that would gain the most commercial significance over the next 5 years.

Hands up if you’ve heard of Constraint Logic Programming.

Slightly sad thing is that CLP does actually look very interesting, as it seeks to tackle the NP-complete class of problems that traditional programming solutions are generally bad at.

Genetic algorithms appear to be more in vogue for NP-complete problems at the moment, possibly because to implement a performant CLP system you generally need an implementation of Prolog, whereas its possible to write a genetic algorithm in any current commodity OO language.

Its somewhat amusing that a DOS utility that came into being about 20 years ago (around the same time as DOS first got directories) is now one of the recommended methods for deploying .NET applications. A commendable example of software reuse, and evidence that the simplest solution is often the correct one.