Sequence diagramming that's fit for purpose
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Illustrate your point Book extract, part 4 In this, the final part of our series of experts from Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg show you how to draw lean, purposeful sequence diagrams that are driven from the use cases and preliminary design.â¦
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Second place has been revealed in Nick Halstead's programming competition - and the 2nd place mark goes to Evan Chiu.   So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.   In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.
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Here's a look at the evolution of software coding from the early days of wires and physical switches to the untimely death of "automatic programming."
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This book excerpt uses an example sales campaign to introduce the Java Data Mining application programming interface.  From data preparation to modeling to evalution and deployment, the short example gives a feel for the business problem and solution.
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On the SitePoint PHP blog today, Troels Knak-Nielsen has written up an article that talks about dependencies in your applications - those little interconnections your code relies on to do more with less.   In lack of better words, I'll call this compositional programming style. It's a style which is usually more prevalent with experienced programmers. [...] There is, however, a dark side to composition - dependencies.   He starts with a definition to bring everyone up to a level field then moves on to how their used (through a "global symbol" or directly passed in) and how they can "leak" if you're not careful.    To help protect you and your code from any kind of damage down the line, Troels suggests making a container to keep objects where they need to be. He even includes an example with namespace support to make things even easier down the road.
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DevShed ramps up another new series today with this new article giving developers a look at working with object-oriented programming through the eyes of design patterns. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnagle book "Advanced PHP Programming".   This chapter provides an overview of the advanced OO features now available in PHP. Some of the examples developed here will be used throughout the rest of this book and will hopefully serve as a demonstration that certain problems really benefit from the OO approach.   The article lays down the foundation for the more complex information to come. It introduces object-oriented programming briefly, and talks about some of the handy features of it - like inheritance, static attributes and methods.
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The first article for this new monthly column looks at eric3, a GUI-based IDE for Python.
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DevShed is moving right along with their series concerning Command objects with this new article showing even more examples of how they're used.   Turning special attention to this second article of the series, I'll develop a few more hands-on examples concerning the pattern in question, thus you can reaffirm the concepts learned in the preceding installment.   They start off by building an array command class to act as a base for the rest of the tutorial. They make two more command classes to point to the commands to be issued (lowercase or reverse a string). Next up is the commanded class to handle the actions themselves. Finally, they plug it all together and show a complete example, including usage.
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
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In a new post to his blog, Jacob Santos talks about why object oriented programming just "isn't easy" - including a few of his dislikes about OOP in PHP.   Functional developers have it easy. Damn straight and I wonder why so many developers choose to write functions, when they can opt for more beautiful classes instead. [...] It is easy to get functions right, all you have to do is prefix them and name them properly and you're done.   He notes that most people get OOP up to a certain point - that being the "has-a" and "is-a" relationships - where things start flying over their heads. He expresses his dislike of the way that Singletons are used (or not used) and places some of the blame on the tutorial and book authors out there trying to teach novice programmers with analogies that don't make sense in a codign situation.
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Analysis paralysis: part two Teams can get stuck wallowing in trivial details when modeling in UML. Sweating such details can lead to frustration and premature, and rash, decisions on using UML later in a project. But how do you know when a particular nuance is inconsequential and when it's an important item to specify?â¦
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How to use command-line tools and basic GraphViz utilities to produce graphs both simple and complex.
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The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.   In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).   He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.
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Work begins on a Perl 6 regexp parser, and Unicode manipulation of strings prompts discussion on the language list.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book "PHP in Action".   If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know youâve been waiting for.   The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.
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Cascading Style Sheets are an important element of current web design. Today, Lee Underwood examines Westciv's Style Master, an application dedicated to the creation and tweaking of Style Sheets. 0705