While coding developers get easily carried away that they don’t bother about the readability and maintainability of it. Of course the readability or maintainability of a code is not going to show up when the code runs. But be cautious that the amount of effort required to troubleshoot, maintain and enhance the code when something new comes up will become tedious as one keeps adding code that is cryptic and untidy. Everything may look OK but when something breaks it is going to take more time to fix like the risk that these people take in this site “Lords of the Logistics“.

I was watching a debate on television which was a special program telecast for Diwali*. The judge of the debate session was telling a story in context with the topic.  I was intrigued by the story he told.  Here it is.

A saint was giving a talk on a great Indian epic in a village.  An illiterate farmer passing by was carried away by the talk of the saint and started listening to him.  After the talk was over the farmer went home and his wife asked him where he was. He told that he was listening to a talk by a saint. His wife asked him what he understood.  He told his wife that he didn’t understand what the saint told but somehow he liked the way the saint explained the epic story.  This went on every day as the saint was explaining the story in parts for ten days.  On the tenth day the farmer’s wife asked him the same question and he told the same answer that he didn’t understand but was interested listening to the saint.

The farmer’s wife asked him to pick up a bamboo basket which is used by the farmers in the Indian villages to collect cow dung (dried cow dung is used as fuel for making food in villages).  The basket is woven with bamboo shoots which has small holes in the intersection of the shoots.  She asked the farmer to collect a basket full of water from the well.  As the farmer tried to collect water in the basket, it seeped away through the holes of the basket.  After seeing the futile attempt of the farmer, his wife told him “The epic story sessions by the saint you attended is like collecting water in this basket. Your brain could not hold what the saint told”.  The farmer replied back, “…but look at the basket, it is clean now.”

Though the story seemed to project the farmer as a stupid person who cannot understand whatever the saint taught but the ending is a twister that really makes us think. The farmer may not have understood the epic but his regular visits to the session has really cleaned his mind in understanding that there is something beyond what he does regularly in his day to day life. There is something to learn in everything.

Wish you a happy and prosperous Diwali to everyone. Happy Weekend

*Diwali - Diwali is a major festival to Hindus as to how Christmas is to Christians or Ramadan is to Muslims.

It is apparent that the X in AJAX stands for XML, but if you have used AJAX it is most likely that you may not have encountered XML as such anywhere in the request/response. Probably you might not have encountered use of XML because your server is not expecting an XML because as far as the server side is concerned it does not matter whether the request is synchronous or asynchronous. Its job is to serve the request and respond back. But there might be situations where the server might be expecting a XML based request. For example let’s say the server has to communicate with some web service for the response. Then if the request is in XML it saves some time and as a simple translation could be applied to frame the request to be sent to the service. Here is a part “Using XML in requests and responses” from the Mastering AJAX series from IBM developerworks that explains with example of how to use AJAX with real XML request and response.

It is very easy as a development team each developer just focuses on what he/she has been assigned and is not aware of what his peers in the project is working on. But from the application perspective it is not restricted by who is working on what feature rather every feature has to work cohesively together. So it is very important that a developer understands his/her module dependencies as well as understands the modules that are dependent on his/her module. Much important than this is to understand how the module that he/she is developing fits in the overall application and how critical it is and what value add it brings in from the business perspective.

In this process usually in a medium to bigger projects developers try to fail in understanding this. The effect is there will be unnecessary issues cropping up during integration. More than the issues I have realized a lot of times a lot of time is wasted on finding out who was the core cause of the problem rather than finding out the core of the problem. Usually this finger pointing exercise ends up like a traffic deadlock with no clue as to who caused it. As said even if the team ends up in such a situation there is no need to find out who caused it rather the team should try to release the deadlock. To release the deadlock at least one person has to say that he/she will fix everything from his/her side so that the problem is solved. Avoiding the finger point deadlock is the best but if that situation arises, see if you are that person who can release the deadlock.

Few days back I had posted about use case. Use case diagrams are the starting point to a good UML design and the better it captures the actors, use cases, relationships it is easy to translate it further to other UML design artifacts that can be translated into a good object oriented code. I tailgated some links to get to this article on “Creating Use Case Diagrams” in Developer.com. It’s a good starting point for any business analyst who wants to start with use cases for a project.

I have been referring links about web 2.0 style guide and I will keep doing so because web 2.0 sites are really cool and gives a pleasant feeling always. The guideline to creating a web 2.0 site is really to be simple. Here is a good article “Introduction to Web 2.0 and the latest styles” by Ben Hunt. The list of common features that Ben has picked up from the web 2.0 sites he has studied that really make a cool web 2.0 website is as follows.

• Simple layout
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colors
• Strong color, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of white space
• Nice big text

I have gone through nerve cracking troubleshooting situations and finally ended up identifying the problem to be a silly typo mistake.  It is something that every developer goes through at least once in his/her lifetime. In some programming languages and scripting languages the variables need not be declared and can be directly used. In such languages there is a high chance that somewhere a simple spelling mistake in the variable could cause everything to go wrong because the misspelled variable becomes another variable.  In effect the statement containing the misspelled variable name can cause unexpected outcome that may become very difficult to troubleshoot.  And if the program does not throw up any error and executes successfully but the outcome is not what is expected then it can become challenging. The best way to handle such a situation is to log the values of variables at key points of the code and isolate the statement that contains the misspelled variable.

Read my other Troubleshooting Tips.

Satish Talim has created a cool Ruby tutorial site “Learning Ruby“. Those of you who want to learn Ruby online this could be one of the sites that you may want to bookmark and learn Ruby in parallel to your work. You definitely want to get to Rails which is the framework built on Ruby to enable web application development but learning Ruby will help before you get into rails.