Care Driven Development: Javascript

There is * Driven Development, where they listed "all possible thing" driven development and dedicated a whole website to it! Well, I am adding one more to the list, "Care Driven Development", with an emphasis to Javascript coding.

Javascript coding, do you care enough?

CSS is the most hairy spagetti piece of almost any web project. And its not leading by a far distance to it's first cousin; Javascript. But, the good thing is, it just takes a little care to clean the bush out of Javascript and make it pretty.

Do you care enough not to use the following ever again?

• $('#deep_under_the_ocean').parent().parent().hide()?
• $.ajax(url: 'bank_accounts/transfer_money', amount: 500...)
• $('#eiffel_tower').height($('#paris').height() +  $('#eiffel_tower base').height() + $('#eiffel_tower tower').height() + ...)
• populateNewYork('east', 'north', 50, 100, 23, ...)
• $('.shark').click(function(){$('.small_fish').attacked(function(){...})})
• parseInt($('.selected').id().split('-').last())

I am compiling a list of such careless JS coding examples and this is just a start. If you have a few to add to this list, please keep sending!

Enterprise Software Projects: oh, yeah!

I just rolled off my first ever enterprise software project couple of weeks ago. After staying six months on the project and while the memory is still fresh, I thought I would write a retrospect on the project and on my role.

The program is rather big, I guess it had ~300 people for the last couple or so years. I joined late for the program. So, by the time I went there, a massive amount of work has already been done, meaning a huge learning curve for me. On retrospect, I think I did well :)

My team was small, 4-5 people including 3 devs. But we were responsible for really high value enterprise integration work, especially, linking the two most important applications in the program. This was a great place to learn some of the core business domain specific knowledge and I loved it!

However, enterprise integration stuff is full of XML messaging and translation. While XSLT works when it works, in our situation we had too much logic and stateful data involved in the translation. So, we had to write a hell lot of custom code for all the XML messaging... and it sucks! Why?

Service APIs change all the time! 

I was mostly writing Java at work in this project for the first time in my professional career. This was a big change as well as a good exposure, considering my recent work mostly being in C# and Ruby.  In retrospect, I would say, I would rather not use Java, its a great platform but offers your an aging language.

Being in the enterprise world means dealing with enterprise service buses, queues, oracle database, weblogic, load balancers, risk and compliance and you name it... sometimes the complexity of these things seemed to be unnecessarily troublesome, but then again, at times they made sense as well.

People factors matter way greater than any other factor in such a big project. In retrospect, I think a hierarchical system often leads to longer meetings, useless communication and less ownership for most people.

I will continue this post to a second episode where I will talk about development practices, challenges with multi-project communication, politics and power relations etc. Stay tuned! 

Aligning an HTML DIV Inside Another One

Across different projects, I have found people taking CSS shortcuts for translating the Photoshopped design templates into HTML. Back in the days, layout used to be all Table based and it was kind of straight forward to fit everything into grid cells. However, with CSS styling the extra flexibility to put elements in any arbitrary layout came extra responsibility - to make sure things still align nicely while being fluid to accommodate different screen resolutions and form factors.

Aligning the child div in red inside a parent div in green using CSS

Here's a quick and dead simple example to create CSS alignment for a div inside another one!

Pro Tip: Use position:relative for the parent div and position:absolute for the child div.

This will make sure the parent is positioned relatively to other elements in the page. However, the absolutely positioned child can be positioned anywhere inside the parent without making the whole layout fixed.

Using instanceof is mostly a Code Smell

When using static programming languages such as Java, often time I have seen people writing methods that accept Object as a parameter. These methods typically don't really work on any Object, but works with multiple types of classes that don't have any common base class. Here's an example of such a method:

As you can see in this example, the process method actually expects one of CleanFloor or LaunchRocket instances. However, since the two don't have a common subclass, it falls back to an Object type. And that results in the smelly code as you see in the example.

An ideal solution would be to change the design of the classes so that you can either use a common base class or a generic method. But if you can't just do that

Get rid of the instanceof anyway!

However, this doesn't need to be smelly. Turning to basics of OO programming concepts, you will recall that there's this thing called method overloading that is specifically there to solve this very problem.

It seems so obvious in this example that you might question, why someone would use the former code? Well, I have seen quite a few of them and if you search for instanceof in your Java project, I won't be surprised if you see a few code fragments that match the former example.