All software has bugs. I don't care if you're Apple, Microsoft, IBM, or a smaller, leaner ISV. Your software has bugs in it. Once you accept this fact, that into each software product a little crap must fall, it becomes clear that what differentiates one software development organization from anothe...

I've gotten lots of feedback, much of it asking "what's the alternative?" to using beans and getters and setters. I'll make a deal with my skeptical readers. I'll argue the negative, with examples, if they argue the affirmative. In other words, you show me some places where you can't get around usin...

I felt like I'd already gotten this rant out of my system, but every time I come across the object oriented wreckage that the Java Bean and it's decendents have wrought, I get all heated up. The problem is, simply stated, that the getters and setters that get used for things like system boundaries -...

One of the bitter consolations of mathematical Computer Science is that we can demonstrate that applying algorithms to analyze algorithms is a largely fruitless task. It starts with the halting problem (can we write a program that takes a program as it's input and determines whether that program hal...

I've used the ILog Business Rules products on a number of projects. Reasonable software. Does the job. Not exactly cheap. I'm not sure why they went for the aquisition by IBM -- it was announced back at the end of July, so likely nothing to do with hard economic times. What does this mean for softwa...

Image of Thomas The Tank Engine is from the New York Times, I think, but I can't find the exact page. I love ActiveRecord. I don't really much like working with relational databases (like Tolkein wizards, databases tend to be good at getting you out of the kind of trouble that databases get you into...

Here's a slightly edited version of my Twitter feed for December 23rd, 2008: 1:59 PM: Wow! Rails 3 = Merb 2. 2:50 PM: Merb is fun to say. Merb Merb Merb Merb Merb. We welcome our new Merby overlords. 2:50 PM: Also twitter added actual people search, so it's a weird day all around. 2:57 PM: Co-worker...

This ends week one of my investigations into PureMVC. So far I'm impressed with the framework itself in it's many versions and incarnations, but the documentation and tutorials for platforms other than Flex leave something to be desired. To all those folks that claim that Cairngorm is easier to lear...

A Prograph code snippet from MacTech, circa 1994. I miss Prograph... Last week, I wrote a blog post with my first impressions from trying out an early beta of JetBrains' RubyMine IDE for Ruby and Rails. I ended with this slightly glib statement: "Overall, the help RubyMine was giving me wasn't the h...

At Pathfinder we do a fair amount of desktop style development -- iPhone/Cocoa, WebForms, Swing -- and web application development -- Grails, Rails, JSP, ASP.NET, etc., etc.. In the last two years we, like a lot of other software development shops, have experienced a convergence in our efforts. The ...