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Why fix invisible code?

Posted by daniel on March 21, 2005 at 9:56 AM EST

Advantages of only shipping binaries

Have you ever been in a house that looks really neat and clean until you open a drawer? In order to get the outside appearance so nice, the people straightening up shoved papers and clothes and items anywhere - just so that they were out of sight. Maybe, suggests Frank Sommers, that's the problem with source code. "Almost nothing you work on ever leaves your development environment or the close confines of your development team." As much as we argue for cleaning up the code base, the visitors to our binary code never look at the clumsy variable names and magic numbers and overly coupled code. They see a clean UI and figure everything is right.

In Also in Java Today , Frank writes that unlike artisans in other areas, we do not deliver what we do. In The Code Quality Myth he writes that musicians deliver the music they produce but computer programmers deliver binaries and not code. This means that "few people outside your close team members ever care about the quality of that source code. And most compilers don't care about source code quality, either - how you name your variables, how long and clean your methods are, the clarity of your object model, or even the algorithms you use, are of little interest to the compiler that can happily create an equivalent binary from ugly or pretty code."

Lorenzo Puccetti says that code reuse has reached a critical juncture: "what we need now is a tool that blends separately developed components into a well-crafted finished product; a tool that protects major subsystems of the architecture from each other." In Building Modular Applications with Seppia, he introduces Seppia, an open source project that lets you build applications from existing jar-based collections of java code, stitching the pieces together with JavaScript.

In today's Weblogs , Inderjeet Singh posts about Pulsating LED on a Powerbook: A case of UI Effects Gone Overboard. He writes " Apple is usually really good at design and UI effects. In this blog, I discuss a UI effect in powerbooks that may be a case of bad design, and talk about some lessons that I learnt in UI design."

In Projects and Communities, The java.net Java Linux community homepage has been relaunched. The left column is full of resources including links to active projects, books and articles, distributions, JVMs, and development tools.

How do Generics alter the implementation of some of the classic GoF patterns? Java Patterns members should read Hugo Troche's article Factory Chain: A Design Pattern for Factories with Generics.

Peter Kessler has some helpful information about Math and the Hotspot VM in today's Forums. "The Sun HotSpot virtual machine starts out interpreting things, and only compiles to native code if a method is used enough to warrant compilation.[..] Also, we offer two runtime compilers, which you access with -client or -server on the command line. The -client runtime compiler generates code quickly, but the generated code itself is only so-so. The -server compiler is a full-up optimizing compiler, and I'd be surprised if we weren't turning Math.sin() and Math.cos() into the hardware instructions on platforms where that was available (maybe after appropriate scaling to get the argument into the range that the instruction can handle)."

HLovatt posts "The following Pattern Enforcing Compiler (PEC) adds multimethods, called multiple dispatch, to standard Java: https://pec.dev.java.net/nonav/compile/index.html Particularly: https://pec.dev.java.net/nonav/compile/javadoc/pec/compile/multipledispatch/package-summary.html"

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Advantages of only shipping binaries
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