Jahr: 2003

Lars Marius Garshol very nicely sums up what’s wrong with Perl: „One of the first things I discovered I didn’t like was the syntax. It’s very complex and there are lots of operators and special syntaxes. This means that you get short, but complex code with many syntax errors that take some time to sort…

Alan Cooper tells how he invented the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool: „[…] Even though the variation among the users was dramatic, a clear pattern emerged after just a few interviews. The users fell into three distinct groups, clearly differentiated by their goals, tasks, and skill levels. […] So I created…

Responding to Joel’s essay, Ned Batchelder explains why exceptions do make sense: „Broadly speaking: * A-layer generates exceptions, * B-layer can often ignore the whole issue, and * C-layer decides what to do“. I see.

Chris DiBona has a nice idea on SQL result caching: „First thing, before any actual real queries happen, the page construction logic should query the tracking table to get a list of tables that have become dirty since the last time a page was constructed, this can commonly become the only query that a page…

In his Architecture Briefings, Ingo Rammer writes about many software developer’s dislike of asynchronous processes: The Flowchart Lie [PDF]: „It seems to be the common approach to map business processes to technical functions using general request/response style communication between client and servers. This is done even though most of the underlying business processes are inherently…

At ONJava.com, Jack Herrington writes: „When the tag-line „Java scales and scripting languages don’t“ was born, it was based on EJB 1.0, an architecture that most Java architects would consider absurd, based on its high overhead. Based on EJB 1.0, Java’s performance was much worse than that of scripting languages. It is only the addition…

Tim Bray On the Goodness of Unicode: „Embrace Unicode, don’t fight it; it’s probably the right thing to do, and if it weren’t you’d probably have to anyhow. Inside your software, store text as UTF-8 or UTF-16; that is to say, pick one of the two and stick with it. Interchange data with the outside…

I always wondered what’s so great about exceptions, and was glad that I don’t have to use them while coding PHP… Now Joel explains why he doesn’t like them: „I consider exceptions to be no better than „goto’s“, considered harmful since the 1960s, in that they create an abrupt jump from one point of code…

Jakob Nielsen: „Intranets are changing from being document repositories to being work support tools. Many of this year’s winners had changed their information architecture (IA) from one determined by how documents are produced (usually the company’s department structure) to one determined by users‘ tasks. But the work-support trend goes further than IA.“

It’s about time to say in public that Microsoft has been left behind: While they went to sleep after releasing Internet Explorer 5.5/6.0, Mozilla and its companions have added so much value to the browser experience (tabbed browsing, blocking popups, selective cookie management, much much better security, not to mention Mozilla being cross-platform) that I’m…