Category Archive for 'Programming'

How do you measure quality?  Number of defects? Customer happiness? Money earned? Developer smiles? That’s the question raised by @gojkoadzic in his keynote at the recent BDD and Agile Testing Exchange in London, to make us think and propose some elements of response. We tend to ignore information We are used to ignore automatic alarms, [...]

Software development technologies and trends are not particularly tangible things, yet we need to reason on them. At Arolla, the company I’m part of, we’ve designed an « ancient world map » of software development, as a cartography of the universe of software development we live in. Built for our own purpose, we also share it so [...]

The Composite pattern is a very powerful design pattern that you use regularly to manipulate a group of things through the very same interface than a single thing. By doing so you don’t have to discriminate between the singular and plural cases, which often simplifies your design. Yet there are cases where you are tempted [...]

In functional programming, Map and Fold are two extremely useful operators, and they belong to every functional language. If the Map and Fold operators are so powerful and essential, how do you explain that we can do our job using Java even though the Java programming language is lacking these two operators? The truth is [...]

In the first part of this article we introduced predicates, which bring some of the benefits of functional programming to object-oriented languages such as Java, through a simple interface with one single method that returns true or false. In this second and last part, we’ll cover some more advanced notions to get the best out [...]

You keep hearing about functional programming that is going to take over the world, and you are still stuck to plain Java? Fear not, since you can already add a touch of functional style into your daily Java. In addition, it’s fun, saves you many lines of code and leads to fewer bugs. What is [...]

As suggested by its name, Domain-Driven Design is not only about Event Sourcing and CQRS. It all starts with the domain and a lot of key insights that are too easy to overlook at first. Even if you’ve read the « blue book » already, I suggest you read it again as the book is at the [...]

If you happen to create your own annotations, for instance to use with Java 6 Pluggable Annotation Processors, here are some patterns that I collected over time. Nothing new, nothing fancy, just putting everything into one place, with some proposed names.

Now that enterprises have chosen stable platforms (JVM and .Net), on top of which we can choose a syntax out of many available, which language will you pick up as your next favourite? New languages to have a look at (my own selection) Based on what I read everyday in various blogs, I arbitrarily reduced [...]

Domain-Driven Design encourages to analyse the domain deeply in a process called Supple Design. In his book (the blue book) and in his talks Eric Evans gives some examples of this process, and in this blog in several parts I will suggest some sources of inspirations and some recommendations drawn from my practice in order to help about this process. [part 2]