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Shipping quality

Posted by daniel on February 22, 2005 at 8:35 AM EST

"Our industry is hideously unprofessional."

In Also in Java Today , Robert Martin hopes that there is no Next Big Thing in an article that includes the quote on unprofessionalism. Modular programming, structured programming, object-oriented programming, agile programming - all things of the past. Looking forward, Bob writes that he hopes "the next big thing is the big thing that we've needed for the last thirty years and haven't had the guts to actually say. I hope the next big thing is professionalism. Perhaps a better word would be Craftsmanship."

Uncle Bob continues, "There are some very professional programmers out there. There are professional teams, and even professional software companies. But they are the exception, not the rule. The rule, the exasperating repetative depressing rule, is that software products are late, over budget, and buggy. Companies who hire programmers don't really know what a programmer is, so they hire just about anybody and tell them to write code. Then they don't look at the code they write."

What do we do about it? A talk back respondent points to the difficulties of doing anything. He points to an analog in another area in which craftsmanship was once the norm. "Once, furniture was always hand-crafted and it was obvious when the craftsman took a professional pride in the job. These days, most furniture is mass-produced often poorly finished and the focus is on minimising cost rather than maximising the value to the consumer. Certainly one can still pay for hand-crafted quality furniture, but it is hardly the norm."

In Let There be Z-Order, John Zukowski writes " z-order only matters when the components overlap. In this case, the program disables the layout manager and manually positions the components. When components overlap, be sure their container returns false from the isOptimizedDrawingEnabled() method that is inherited from JComponent. This ensures that lower z-order components are not drawn on top of higher components."

William Wake shares a technique which uses an anonymous subclass to load constant data in today's Weblogs . For details, check out his Anonymous subclass with instance initializer.

John Reynolds shares some thoughts on Pragmatic Web Forms: WebForms2. I reports that he "recently came across a discussion of WebForms2, and after checking out the links I've come away pleasantly optimistic that building form-centric web applications is about to get simpler."

Tim Boudreau is prepping for an internal presentation and shares POV-Ray support for NetBeans...and pix from the road. He says that "POV-Ray scene language makes a nice demo for explaining how to do some things. So NetBeans now has POV-Ray support (screen shot in blog)"

In Projects and Communities, the Portlets community points to a tip on the similarities and differences between Portlets and Servlets.

The Java Patterns community points to TheServerSide thread on the Difference between FrameWork and DesignPattern.

Sandoz suggests The DOM needs to be extended in today's Forums. "Working out what algorithms apply to what sequence of characters without some hints is a tricky problem to solve in a performant manner and also may have some unwanted side-effects."

Ulfzibis writes "There are examples in the API where exceptional situations are not handled by Exception and must be caught by boolean query : boolean java.io.File#renameTo(File dest) If the renaming fails, no Exception is thrown. You must test the return value for true."

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"Our industry is hideously unprofessional."
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