March 24, 2004

Thoughts on Class Naming

I've noticed that I often include redundant information in my class naming schemes and have been meaning to re-evaluate if and when its really neccessary.

For example the following classes are typical of how I name things:

com.versionary.struts.actions.ViewProductAction
com.versionary.struts.forms.ProductForm
com.versionary.beans.ProductBean
com.versionary.dao.ProductDAO
com.versionary.services.ProductService

Is it really neccessary to append this sort of "metainformation" to the class name when it is obvious they are such things based on the package they belong to?

Isn't that the whole reason why there are packages to avoid naming collision? It seems like in the purest sense they should all be named Product and let the object instance name do all work resolving this supplementary information for the developers reference. Well in practice it really doesnt work out that way it seems.

The only way I can explain the need for this sort of redundant description in the class name is in the following case I use a ProductDAO,ProductBean, ProductService and ProductForm in the ViewProductAction, which is often the case for me at least. The big advantage is I don't have to fully qualify to resolve each of them, which seems to be important, though I don't know how this became ingrained in me. Is this a holdout from our programming heritage, ingrained in our psyche? Why is a FQN so ugly to us but a long class not?

At all costs we avoid dealing with fully qualifying a class and consequently we are overly descriptive in our class naming. I wonder why we all think like this. In an extreme way it kind of makes you question the point of even having an actions,forms,beans,dao and services package other than for appearances and habit if I'm just going to append this sort of information to the class name anyway. With a naming convention like this every class can happily reside in one application package with no problems. I'm not suggesting any of this single global package is something I'd ever do, but I'm just thinking it really wouldn't make a difference if I did.

Perhaps I'm thinking about things incorrectly. Maybe this sort of naming is a neccessary redundancy for the sake of a greater simplification i.e. avoiding fully qualifying. I was going through various example/sample projects out there just to see how other people do their naming. For struts and ww, every piece of Action code I've ever come across always appends Action to the class name. This seems to be a standard practice even though the chances of the developer actually referencing this class anywhere outside the configuration file is usually very slim so the fully qualifying argument doesnt really apply here yet we all still do it.

On another front the Spring framework's jpetstore app and some recent purchases have left me thinking that maybe what I've been calling beans are in most cases more appropriately called domain objects. It seems that in the Spring code domain objects receive a naming preference in the application and go unappended while other potentially ambiguous classes have their secondary information added to them. This seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since I was not giving any class this distinction previously.

Now the question becomes is it really simpler to "pollute" the class name with this information or fullly qualify to avoid it.

I'm probably going to stick with how I've been doing things except shift to giving my bean/domain objects preference to the "unpolluted" name for now and think a little more about it.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 07:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

March 18, 2004

One Tabbed Browser to Rule them All

MyIE2 is really amazing. If your running Windows and not using it, you've got to try it.

It's got tabs, gestures,ad blocking, pop up blocking, embeds IE in this environment and in the most recent builds you can now embed the gecko engine as well. So now you can have one tab rendering with gecko and the tab next to it rendering with IE! To get this functionality all you have to do is install the Mozilla ActiveX Control along with MyIE2.

Nice Right?

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 07:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

March 15, 2004

Ketchup; see also Catch-Up

First off, anybody who knows me, knows I have a compulsion for buying books, mostly technical books, but these days I've been obsessing on a lot of poker stuff too. With that here are a few of my recent aquisitions.

Ordered these promising gems the other day, looking forward to them arriving.

and

I'm currently reading this. Probably going to do the cert at some point in the future and this book looked like a pretty good exam study guide with a different presentation slant.

So far its pretty fun, and very easy to absorb. I don't really care for the visual style because to me the 50's style pictures and catch phrases that they use is a played-out-i'm-way-too-cool-and-hip kind of thing... But i've worked past that personal visual bias and am really enjoying the text and format.

This is one of my favorite purchases so far this year! Easily The best Optimus Prime Toy ever made. It's AWESOME.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 18, 2003

LOAF is a really dumb joke, can you please move on?

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 11:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

October 10, 2003

My 1st Apple

Has Shipped and Panther will be delivered to me on the evening of the 24th and my 512MB ram upgrade arrived from crucial yesterday.

I've spent a LONG time mulling over this purchase, I've been interested in getting an Apple since I first heard about Rhapsody some 6? years ago.

Initially when the G5's were introduced and I saw panther's feature set I became convinced that it was time to make my move but the more I thought about it the more I said to myself if I have a G5 sitting at home all day, doing nothing it is going to KILL ME. I wouldn't be able to concentrate on work knowing that machine was sitting idle at home.

So that made me start thinking about powerbooks, the new 12" while nice has a retarded built-in 256MB ram with only 1 expansion slot, so the maximum ram is only 768 without buying a $700 dollar 1gb ram chip, the 17" is pretty sweet but a touch unruly due to size in my estimation and the new 15" is a perfect middle ground.

So after going over the price variations for each model in my head and ton of visits to the apple store I finally decided on the 15" to be my very first apple computer and if things go well with my "Switch" the dual G5 can eventually be my second apple!

Now I have to find myself a nice messenger style laptop bag.

PowerBook G4 15.2/1.25GHZ/512/80/SD/A
The unit above contains the following options:

Processor 065-4116 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
Memory 065-4541 512MB DDR333 SDRAM
Hard Drive 065-4544 80GB Ultra ATA Drive@5400rpm
Optical Drive 065-4119 Super Drive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
Country Kit 065-4496 Country Kit/Airport Extreme
Keyboard/Mac OS Language 065-4495 BkLit Keyboard/Mac OS

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 04:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

September 15, 2003

odds & ends

Well, long time no blog, here's some junk that's on my mind:

• I've been enamored with apple machines for a while ever since I heard about rhapsody, but I've never actually bought one. Now that I feel I'm ready to actually lay down some cash for a G5 when panther comes out I figured I'd go through 'em. There have always been these little things that bug the hell out of like why does apple maximize window not take up the full screen like windows maximize does? I've read posts where apple people say its actually better human interface because it doesnt take up any more space than it actually needs blah blah blah but i can't help getting annoyed with this bit of functionality. I think that I can get past it though with time.

  Another minor quirk that always annoyed me was that there was a really poor alt-tab'ing interface. I alt-tab like mad, thats just the way I do things and the apple implementations prior panther are junk. Panther has finally fixed this admittedly petty gripe for me with expose and a real ctrl-tab functionality like I'm used to on windows.

  I've spent my fair share of time at apple stores, trying to get a feel for os x and one of the other short comings to my taste is the lack of feature control i see in their control panel type thing. I like to be able to turn off and on things like showing window contents while resizing and moving because they slow crap down even with quartz+++ on g4's I havent really seen a g5 yet. I like fine tuning these aspects of my ui, and os x seems to lack this type of fine grained control. Are OS X configuration settings stored in flat files in some /etc structure? if so then that wouldnt be so bad. I think I can get over this however as most of the choices apples make for you seem pretty decent.
  



• Ok this next bit let me preface with I'm an IDEA junkie, have been so for the past 2 years but my company is big into IBM and we use WSAD, Websphere, and they got rid of DB2 for Oracle a couple years ago. Now one good thing about using an IDE and an App server from one vendor is they usually have good integration, which in this case is true. The integration is pretty tight and if I'd never used IDEA, I'd say that IBM did a pretty slick job with their eclipse plugins on 5.1 and be loving it. The integrated debugging with WS5 is quite good, the perspectives thing is pretty cool and SWT has been fine for me, the struts integration is a little better than just struts console, and the CVS integration is pretty good. With all that said here are my petty gripes that keep me from the eclipse platform and firmly entrenched as an IDEA lover: keyboard shortcut configuration is weak, no anti-aliased fonts, the project is not in sync with the file structure without manually refreshing, ctrl-o which gives you a uml popup of your class has way too short of a column count, no code folding, template system is weaker, code inspection is weaker, IDEA's code formatting engine is much smarter as far as line wrapping, quick javadoc is weaker, no monospaced font like in IDEA, syntax highlighting is weaker, weaker code intention insight, open type, open resource dialog include every library and possible file in the project, I'm only interested in my own code 99.99% of the time, context menus inside a file are missing team features like commit,update,rollback, i wish i could create a mouse shortcut to close a tab when middle clicked...
  

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 12:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

June 24, 2003

WWDC 2003

Wow I just watched the WWDC 2003 keynote from Jobs, man Panther looks amazing. I'm definately gonna pick up a G5 when panther comes out. The new window finder thing is crazy, it thumbnails all open windows onto the desktop and you choose the right one, and it renders fast as hell! New Mail threading looks decent I guess. The finder has instant search results, almost like inline completion fast on a web browser, speaking of web browsers Safari is looking pretty sweet too now, Xcode seems kinda interesting to play around with as well.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 10:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 09, 2003

I LOVE this kid!

Ok, not java related and I may behind the times in internet humour, but I just found out about this and I LOVE this kid, hes awesome I must share.

Watch and enjoy.

this one first ---> Original

Star Wars kid Remix

Star Wars Kid Clones

and my favorite
Star Wars kid RELOADED

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 09:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 24, 2003

My AOP journey has begun

So, AOP, verrrry topical among the java.blogger crowd and TNCNTIWTPW (the next cool new thing i want to play with) heh.

I downloaded the sample chapters from theserverside for the new Manning AspectJ book and started reading through. I really wasnt sure what AOP was or what it bought you. I can understand the Interceptor pattern, but I already learned that AOP!=Intercepter so I figured that there was more. I'm still not sure what the more is, but what has sunken in so far seems kinda cool. I think it definately would be fun to apply some AOP to a project.

One of the things however that came to mind is, If I create aspects for different parts of a system, and somebody goes to modify my code but doesnt know about the aspects, that could lead to a lot of confusion.

Assuming that they are aware the system has aspects applied to it, Without an IDE saying where the crosscutting is, did I use that term correctly? they would have to pick through all the aspects every time they see behaviour that is not directly in class to really get the picture.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 12:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

April 16, 2003

A programmers language editor

Am I the only one who wishes there was word completion in the document editor they use for email or any other non coding writing they do.

It would be dictionary based of course and the tense currently used in sentence to formulate the dropdown list. How cool would that be? Sometimes MS Word does it with todays date and such.

I can't tell you how many times I've begun typing words and pressed ctrl-space to complete the word I was typing or ctrl-w to highlight surrounding text and closed or almost closed the damn document I was editing.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 09:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

April 12, 2003

I got a new monitor!

I've been putting off getting a new monitor for quite some time, I was thinking of getting one of those older SGI 24" 'ers I see on ebay but they seem to run about $600-$700 before shipping. I didn't feel like spending that much just yet so I picked up a semi-new 21 " 'er for half that.

Its a Sony trinitron on the inside, OEM'd by by Dell. Yay me!

By the by Dell is having a damn good offer on new PC's right now. I just saw it on dealspree, $399 after a mail in rebate for a pretty good box, all it needs is some RAM. Now if only I could pick up the apple counterpart for a price so nice.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 08, 2003

Anybody notice this?

I'm not sure how recently they added this to their menu, but I just noticed it. VB Development on java.sun.com. I guess they are starting their push to embrace VB developers now.

Also what the hell is up with the sun servers? I cant download anything or look at bug parade, their servlets keep crashing. Anybody else getting that?

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 04, 2003

Swinging away in 1.4.2

So 1.4.2 beta was released and I've been pretty eager to get it since I heard about all the fixes and updates they were going to do on Swing to be more inline with new WinXP interface stuff as well as GTK2.

I downloaded it and ran the swingset demo from javastart for a quickie test view, seems to pretty kickass. Most of the widgets look good, except the tab for JCombobox that does the face switcher thing which still is humongous-ly mis-sized, whats odd is that the comboboxes on the other pages and all apps I've used are sized appropriately, this was the same in 1.4.x, don't know why.

Another thing is as of now Swing doesn't pick up some of the finer details of a customized environment, for instance when I use Luna interface in WinXP, I resize the title-bars down to a reasonable 20 pixels or whatever, the default is like 25 which is just obscenely huge. Swing doesn't pick this up and for internal windows, it uses the default title-bar size of 25 which is not a super huge deal to me because apps I like use tabs not internal windows.

I also read today that intellij are going to be supporting 1.4.2 in the new EAP builds, yay! I can't wait to see IDEA with a real Luna L&F. Now if only i could get the jre hack to work for me on 3.0.3 to make it use 1.4.2beta as well, that would be very sweet.

Posted by Andre Mermegas at 04:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 31, 2003

If my life was a game of Jeopardy!

The first round opening board would be:

March 20, 2003

JSTL make JSP viable again?

Will JSTL/JSP2.0 make Velocity advocates think again about using JSP for new projects or is it too little too late?

If you saw Velocity and JSP2 in a project intermixed depending upon the situation what would you think? Is that a bad design strategy? Do you think it would be inconsistant or swiss army like efficient, I'm not sure what I'd think, I can see it both ways.

It might worthwhile to pick and choose your view in certain situations perhaps, they dont really have to be mutually exclusive.

Right now I'm thinking JSTL/JSP2 is pretty cool if they have to be mutually exclusive I'd choose it, but I'm open for dialogue.