Malcolm Davis's Blog

July 2004 Archives

The Humble Programmer

I've looked for the Humble Programmer sometime ago, and all I could find was a used copy on Amazon. You can now download a PDF copy from http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF

Over the last 30 years, many of the themes Dikjkstra talked about have been re-communicated over and over again. For instance, "The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.."

In Writing Solid Code, Steve Maguire says "Write code for the 'average' programmer".

JDBC 4.0 is a tigress

Factory Pattern: Many developers already apply the factory pattern for JDBC connections. The new standard finally applies the pattern, eliminating the need to use the connection manager and some of the code surrounding the connection creation. The connection manager will still exist for backward compatibility.

SQL 2003: For the SQL guru’s, the next version will be SQL 2003 compliant including the support for XML datatypes.

IsValid: Anyone who has developed a connection pool has been frustrated with the inability to verify the state of the connection. The isClosed() only determines if the connection was closed, not the state of the connection. The new isValid() will determine if the connection is still valid.

ROWID: Many developers that implement TransferObject pattern, utilize a DatabaseKey idom. The idom helps with update/delete operations on a TransferObject by storing the database key/index information with the TransferObject. JDBC implements the DatabaseKey idom in the form of a new type called ROWID. ROWID hides the implementation of row index (or identity) due to the fact that the key implementation may vary between vendors.

JDBC 4.0 contains other enhancements with the inclusion of Metadata capability.

A major release that will make many that use JDBC very happy. :-)

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