Saturday, June 25, 2005

Language Oriented Programming

I was browsing my RSS feeds and noted an update on Martin Fowler's bliki dealing with Language Workbenches for Language Oriented Programming (LOP). This entry led to an article by Sergey Dmitriev entitled, Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm. As I was reading through the article I came across the statment:


In mainstream programming, most of the time spent 'programming' is really just finding ways to express natural language concepts in terms of programming level abstractions, which is difficult, not very creative, and more or less a waste of time. For example, today a good deal of development time is spent on object-oriented design (OOD). This is actually a fairly creative process where the programmer expresses classes, hierarchies, relationships, and such. The purpose of this exercise is to express the program in object-oriented terms such as classes and methods. The process of OOD is necessary because these classes and methods are the only abstractions that object-oriented languages understand. It seems like it is necessary and creative, but with Language Oriented Programming, OOD is not needed at all.
Okay, now you have my undivided attention. Having just spent a week in RUP training which was about taking use cases and performing "use case realization" which is completed to translate the anticipated business line usage senarios of the application in question, I was really interested.

The article then discusses the aspects of LOP. Then following this an overview of LOP and a JetBrains' Meta Programming System overview dealing with LOP is provided. Most interesting.
Needless to say, I will be reading more on LOP.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

RUP Development Iterations and TDD together

I have spent most of this week in Rational Unified Process (RUP) training, presented by the Ivar Jacobson International company. The training was engaging in that there were several opportunities for group discussion and hands-on exercises.

During a class discussion it was stated by the teacher that within the old waterfall lifecycle approach, when the project was nearing the production release date, testing was the portion of the project that got squeezed out due to a looming deadline. The discussion then moved to the fact that within the phases of RUP, iterative style development insures that testing for that particular iteration is done and not affected by timeline pressures.

When the instructor stated that, I quickly considered past situations within development iterations where testing time still got "squeezed" because of the various pressures to move to the next iteration. Because I know the value of the Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology I thought, what if, within the RUP phase iterations, TDD was utilized?

First, the TDD methodology could ensure that the developer tests are passing and that code coverage is almost complete. In addition, TDD would make certain that the code is refactored and ready for the next development iteration. TDD could also provide a living artifact to demonstrate to the stakeholders of the project that the entire bank of developer tests is passing. (You TDDers know the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see the green bar of tools like JUnit or NUnit.) Finally, the tests provide a quick and automated regression testing mechanism when any changes are made to code base in future iterations.

Thursday, June 16, 2005

The Rational Unified Process and Test Driven Development

Since I have spent most of this week in RUP training, presented by the Ivar Jacobson International company, I was reading a blog from Mike Bosch concerning the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Extreme Proramming (XP).

I agree with Mike concerning "Unless you have a LOT of authority you will find it very exhausting to try and influence a culture change without buy-in from your management." I work at a large financial institution which whole heartedly supports RUP. In addition to having one of the "three amigos" own consulting company contracted to provide detailed courses on the four phases of RUP and their various disciplines, Dr. Jacobson has often provided great lectures to the application development teams that are broadcast to the various corporate team locations within the United States. In my view that is great. However any corresponding and/or competing methodology is typically viewed with skepticism and then ignored.

I have found that within the corporate environment I have been able to introduce Test Driven Development as a programming methodology that our dev team can use internally. In fact I am finding that it is a relatively easy sale because TDD is so effective concerning both the quality of code and efficiency of the team production! Moreover, the artifact of the tests is a great source of "developer oriented documentation" for new team members that are already familiar with developer testing tools such as JUnit or NUnit.

All in all, RUP is a tried and tested methodology for an organization as large as the one that I am currently employed. Yet, it is greatly enhanced by agile processes.

Monday, June 13, 2005

My First C# DotNetNuke Module

Click here to see the ramblings of my first C# DotNetNuke custom module. In the normal tradition, its a Hello World module. What else could it be, right?

Initial DotNetNuke "gotchas" with Windows XP Pro

After reading for sometime the great reviews of the opensource portal, DotNetNuke, I decided to download it and give it a spin. Wonderful framework but a few "gotchas" when installing on a Windows XP Pro OS workstation.

Click here to find out more.