Fluent interfaces is a concept that your api is closely designed to the problem area it solves and is written in the target programming language (internal DSL), so there is no language barrier from the view of client code. The goal is to make code more concise, better readable and thus easier to grasp or understand. Martin Fowler already discusses this principle in his blog-entry . For my side I found this principle especially helpful in unit test cases to make test code much more comprehensible and easier to maintain. This entry shows a simple concrete real world example how a fluent interface could look like.
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To benefit from the principle of Continous Integration you need a good testing suite which includes both regression and new-feature tests. Regressions tests focus on testing features which are already implemented and shouldn’t be changed or influenced by latest commited changes. When software evolves such regression tests play a major role for the set of “old” features is far bigger compared to the new ones. One of Continous Integration’s key features is to run test automatically and reporting the results to us, so we are notified when something has been broken and we can react on this quickly. This article discusses what dangers can occur when relying too much on the green bar of your test-suite results.
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Even in rich GUI applications days I think that the keyboard is the best and quickest way to fulfill common tasks. This of course is not restricted to typing in text into IDEs, word processors or alike. Still, many people are browsing file system, coyping files or executing application commands (Save, Copy/Paste, etc.) by using the mouse only. When I see this I always think that these people could speed up their work considerably if they would just invest to learn shortcuts or using the command line properly. To sum-up: Different to the vital animals in basements or backyards their computer counterparts are most likely the bottleneck of your work. You may wonder why I put this kind of topic into a software engineering blog… Well, to me mastering the keyboard and the command line is a very important part in my daily job. High Speed of obvious tasks should be your friend to get more time for the more interesting things.
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With Continous Integration you send your work to a central place and a checking is being done which tells you if your stuff still works for itself and together with the other parts of the system. This kind of check should be done quick and often (to keep the feedback loop short) so it is mostly done automatically by tools. Martin Fowler already gives a good introduction to this practice, and this book gives even more detailed information, so I won’t cover already discussed topics. For myself I found the idea of Continous Integration so universal, that it can even be applied to other work bits which aren’t directly connected to source code. This way quality of other work artifacts can be enhanced.
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I managed my content from my former website with my own built content management system CMS4_aldana. Reason was that I needed something simple which fulfilled my simple needs. But at the time where I am starting my blog I looked for respective capabilities. With this Wordpress already made a good impression on other sites I have seen. So I gave it a try and did a migration from CMS4_aldana to wordpress 2.3. The following text gets a bit more in detail what was good about setting up wordpress and which things made some problems.
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