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Micro-architect

Posted by daniel on November 2, 2004 at 11:28 AM EST

A new name for a specialist

In today's Weblogs, Joerg Plewe explains µ-architecture. Your project may have architects who work on the big picture but you may need people who concentrate on specific areas. He asks if you have "ever seen what happens when a former VisualBasic or MFC coder constructs a Swing GUI? A massacre!! [..] Half a year later, your whole business logic is distributed over a net of FocusListeners, KeyListeners, AncestorListeners. Zillions of lines of code, an ugly, inconsistant GUI and the whole team totally occupied with just GUI coding and bug fixing."

He suggests that the solution is to find that "one single experienced Swing guru somewhere in your team. Unrecognized so far. Coming along with a nice little API that separates data from presentation and introduces abstract events (like 'user wants to open something' in favor of 'mousePressed', 'keyPressed', 'focusLost'). He shows a clean path how to apply a simple MVC pattern".

In Also in Java Today , Qusay H. Mahmoud has written an introduction to Using and Programming Generics in J2SE 5.0. He writes that "The motivation for adding generics to the Java programming language stems from the fact that a collection doesn't contain information about the element type, the need to keep track of what type of elements collections contain, and the need for casts all over the place. Using generics, a collection is no longer treated as a list of Object references, but you would be able to differentiate between a collection of references to Integers and collection of references to Bytes. A collection with a generic type has a type parameter that specifies the element type to be stored in the collection."

In 2002, Alan Cooper and Kent Beck faced off over Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design. It is interesting to revisit their arguments two and a half years later. Cooper does not think much of customers saying "Neither the people who buy software nor the people who use it have the capability of visualizing something as complex as the behavior of software. They also don't have the ability to analyze what appropriate behavior is." Beck answers "the shining city on the hill is to create a process that uses XP engineering and the story writing out of interaction design. This could create something that's really far more effective than either of those two things in isolation."

In Projects and Communities , Software Reality has an interview with NetBeans' Tim Boudreau, in which he discusses the upcoming release of NetBeans 4.0, competition with other IDE's, usability, overhauled features, and future plans for NetBeans.

Next week on Java Live find out What's New With Swing including features such as a skinnable look and feel (Synth) and printing support for JTable components.

What about an image acquisition API for Mustang? In today's Forums entzik writes it would be nice to have one "with a few default implementations like twain wrapper on windows & mac, a sane wrapper on linux and so on. It shall have a pluggable architecture so that third party providers and systems can write adaptors for their devices."

Opinali suggests "extra language-level operator support for critical types, like BigInteger and BigDecimal (and maybe also arrays/matrices, new J2SE classes like Complex that I'd like to have in Mustang too, etc.)."

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A new name for a specialist
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