Summa

I came across this issue a couple years ago. It was surprisingly not-so-obvious to the developer, a good developer, who was sorting out a very elusive bug in a large Java application.

The symptom was that a Map of objects sometimes returned null when queried. The developer ran the code in a debugger and could see that the object was put into the Map. Yet, when the map was asked to retrieve the object, it was not found (even though it could be seen by inspection in the debugger).

Other objects were successfully stored and retrieved from the same Map.

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Applications for mobile platform are increasingly becoming an important market sector for all kinds of service providers. With the growing popularity of the iPhone and Apple’s well designed SDK, there are plenty of iPhone development project offerings even in this slow economic scenario. At Summa, we recently had a great experience developing a sleek iPhone application with a large user base. The purpose of this blog is to put together conceptual information along with project experiences around the important aspects of Objective-C’s memory management that would be helpful as one begins to delve deep into iPhone development.

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I have worked on a few large Flex applications, and almost everything about the platform delights me — it is quick to prototype, powerful in creating rich UIs. But it often frustrates me how difficult it is to handle run-time errors. There are posts, discussions and threads around tackling this issue. I have put together some of those ideas into a solution that I like, and wanted to share it.

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A few weeks ago I ran into a Java problem that took me an embarrassingly long time to solve — I won’t even tell you how long it took me to notice the source of the bug. It’s a relatively common mistake for starting developers — and clearly it even happens once in a while to experienced guys who aren’t paying attention. I figured I would detail my problem in the hopes that someone else out there might run across this post and save themselves half an hour or more of combing through their code.

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I know plenty of developers who, at a tactical level, have had success with static source code analysis tools, using them to help find and root out bad code smells. When PMD tells us there’s an empty catch block at line 207, for instance, we know exactly what to do.

At an aggregate level, however, code metrics are seldom so helpful or straight-forward. When seeing that a source tree has 160,000 lines of code or an average cyclomatic complexity of 4.12, our first thought is usually “interesting!”…followed shortly by “well, now what?”.

The problem is, in my experience, we often look at our code metrics in isolation, without good comparison points, leaving us to wonder whether the numbers we see are big or small, typical or abnormal, good or bad. In the end, it’s not clear what to do, if anything.

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XML Schema Definition (XSD) files define the structure and data types used in XML messages. XML schemas are a must-have in any application that relies on the use of XML. XML Schemas have become the universal definition language for integrating systems, as well as for defining common formats used for data interchange. Although there is not a “one size fits all” standard for creating schemas, it is essential to define XML Schema standards within IT organizations in order to ensure XML schemas can be easily reused, maintained and extended while minimizing impact on existing integrations. Without best practices and naming conventions, a project can end up with inconsistent schemas that may be too rigid or too relaxed to meet project requirements. On this blog post, I will go over ten practical tips for designing and building reusable XML Schemas. These recommendations can be used as a starting point for defining XML Schema standards within your organization.

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Say you need to hide internal application errors to your users in a friendly way and also notify the support staff of this exceptional condition. In this post you’ll find a way to do that in a JSF web app. The JSF flavor I’m using is Apache MyFaces 1.1 JSF implementation with the Tomahawk component which provides some extra functionality on top of JSF.

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For most developers coming from a Java or .Net background, there can be a rather steep learning curve when trying to pick up Objective C for iPhone development. This article serves as perhaps a starting point for these beginner iPhone Applications developers to get a sense of where the difference between the languages is, and where to concentrate their early learning efforts.

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My background is with mostly Java and Flex development, so there was a lot to get used to with Xcode. One of the steepest learning curves came with Interface Builder. With Interface Builder, you are making a choice: do I want to write my interface with code or do I want to design it with IB? There are pros and cons to both approaches, but it is good to know you are making the choice. After writing a large iPhone app, I have divined the following “lessons” for my own personal style.

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For many Java/C# developers, developing for a mobile device is a new experience. Of course - we have the fringe Windows Mobile and J2ME developers, but the vast majority have used Java/C# for web and application development only. In order to develop for a mobile device, you need to be able to run the software on the device, but is this the lone choice? Apple and the XCode development environment provide the iPhone Simulator, an application to run and debug iPhone software without using an actual device. While this is a fantastic productivity enhancement (reduces the time necessary to deploy the code to the device), you need to be careful with this ability.

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Today, I’ve had no meetings with management (a rarity). But I’ve been away from my desk virtually the entire day, running from cube to cube helping developers do their work.The chance to mentor other developers is one of my favorite things about being a consultant. Mentoring really goes hand-in-hand with being a consultant, especially a senior consultant. Consultants are often looked on to play this role (the mentor/coach) even if it’s not explicitly asked of them. Be sure to take every opportunity to help others when you can. Be proactive; offer your help wherever you can be useful. Helping other developers helps you as well.

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Welcome to the kickoff of Developing iPhone Applications, a series of blogs aimed at helping programmer, engineers, and architects coming from a Java/C# background to create rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Leveraging Summa’s experience and past projects, we are going to create blog entries on a variety of topics.

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Over the last few weeks, during downtimes between meetings and so on, I have spent several hours deleting unused and duplicated code. By the time I was done I’d killed around 500 lines of code (out of a 20,000 line project). So you shrank the codebase by a couple percent. So what? Why would I ever bother doing that?

Well I’ll tell you, deleting code provides a number of wonderful benefits — some purely mental, and some very practical.

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As is often the beginning of most anything we do, this story starts with necessity! Unfortunately for me, the necessity was caused by my own screw-up: I had to restore my wife’s computer from a backup and instead of giving files their original modified timestamp, I accidentally chose to set the timestamp to the current time! Well, now she lets me know how difficult it is to arrange our digital pictures into their appropriate months when the files are misdated!

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Think it’s a weird kind of question? Not for people who have worked (or are working) on applications that are moving from one framework to another. I happened to work on one such project where a transition from Struts to Spring MVC was being done over a few releases. Not unexpectedly, this approach of supporting two frameworks at the same time gave the development team its own share of interesting challenges. And one such issue was how to use a new technology i.e. Spring themes in both frameworks, of course we could choose not to use it in enhancements to legacy Struts based application flows but then that would have meant doing the enhancements twice.

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