Blogging Roller

Anthony Eden and Thomas Wheeler are working to compare the many web application frameworks out there and the are off to a nice start with this <a href= "http://waferproject.org/feature-matrix2.html">feature matrix. Currently, they are focusing only on Java frameworks. I had no idea that there were so many. Published books are an important form of documentation, so the documentation column should indicate the number of books on each framework. In terms of books on bookstore shelves, Cocoon and Struts are probably the best documented frameworks on the list.

I'm pretty sure that I first heard the term "brute force debugging" from my mom, who is also a programmer. I was writing about debugging this weekend, so I tried to find the origin of the term via Google. I didn't find the origin, but I did find some interesting <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Ehendrixs/classes/lectures/lecture_10.pdf">lecture notes on debugging by Susan Hendrix of the <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/">Univ. of Colorado, Boulder. I really like Hendrix's guidelines for debugging. The first two are think and sleep on it. Great advice, wouldn't you agree? I really need to do more of both, whether I am involved in debugging or not.

Hendrix really doesn't like brute force debugging. She says that there are three brute force debugging techniques: 1) use of dumps, 2) scattering print statements randomly, and 3) over-reliance on debuggers. That doesn't sound quite right. My mom taught me that brute force debugging was the practice of placing well positioned print statements in code to locate where a bug is occuring. I like that definition better, but it is my mom's definition so what do you expect? If my mom was still programming today, I bet she'd be using Log4J, or something similar, instead of brute force debugging, no matter how you define it.

Blogging Roller is an example of what's wrong with the world...[Bob McWhirter]

OK, Ok, ok... listen to Phish. Just be aware that Phish can be a gateway to more serious jams.