One can ask why we need to think of CR practices at all. Review of code written by another team member can be done without any preparation or introduction. It is true, but there are some aspects that we need to think of. In my opinion, we especially need to support the following values:Quality – Code Review should be done in the same way, no matter if you are hurrying, bored or it’s your 3rd hour of doing CR,Motivation – team has to see value in Code Review, and this value shouldn’t be lost because of ne...

There is a belief among many developers that JavaScript is very slow, and writing more code in it than it’s necessary may adversely affect the performance. I guess it’s partially true. Incompetent use of this language can indeed decrease the quality of the project and the performance itself. However, JavaScript is one of the most developing languages.I’ll show you a few examples that will prove that JavaScript engines do what they can to speed up your code. In my work I focus on Google’s open source Java...

There are a lot of aspects to be considered while developing real world applications. Maintainability, Understandability, Clarity, Dependency are just a few of them. We have to work hard to maintain our code and make it self-commenting, preserve it from cyclic dependencies between assemblies or simply, to provide its good quality. There are a lot of tools that may help to achieve these goals e.g. Sonar, ReSharper, JustCode or NDepend. This article explains how to analyse the quality of code with the use ...

Why does it happen? Why do we limit ourselves to relational databases only? Of course, there exists a set of situations in which relational databases are the best tool for the job, but – conversely – there exists a set of situations where relational database is a very inferior tool. Each type of tool has its purpose, limitations, and applications in which the tool will be the best. The important thing is not to look at the application from the point of view of a database only. We need to look at the ap...

Modelling load distribution One of the challenges we face during the performance test design is determining the load we should use. By the load here, I mean a number of concurrent users performing certain actions in System Under Test (SUT). Obviously, depending on the type of performance test applied, the load will alter, as we are testing system in search of different class of problems. This article attempts to describe the case in which we will try to simulate the anticipated high traffic in t...

Building better client-side JavaScript applications For some time now, you could have noticed a trend in web applications development to build more and more complicated applications, moving more logic from the server to the client side. Is it an appropriate trend? I don’t know. The discussion between supporters and opponents of each approach may look like discussion concerning superiority of Easter over Christmas; it’s hard to concede the point to any side as they have their arguments. That is w...

Automation of desktop applications This article presents principles and best practices related to automation of a desktop application. I will try to explain differences between desktop, web and client/server application to help you to understand influence of unique factors on automation of a desktop application. I am also going to write a few words about tools that are designed to make automation process feasible and easy. For the purpose of this article I will focus on standalone desktop appli...

Selected Aspects of Document Synchronization in Distributed Systems Two of the projects in which I have participated recently, were distributed systems based on the document replication. Each of them was slightly different, which affected the solutions. In this article I’m going to present briefly the main assumptions and requirements for each of the projects, as well as the implemented solutions. I’m also going to mention a few important problems that we had to deal with.General description of ...

Role of the Application Architect “Architect” is one of the buzzword, sometimes used just to name an important person working in the software development department. In other cases, we will call this way the only people who understand how given software works. For some people it will be another level of software developers’ career ladder. Sometimes word ‘architect’ describes a person who draws lines and rectangles on whiteboards. All in all, most of us saying “architect” does not actually know,...

CouchDB – short review During one of our last projects we had a small 2-year adventure with Apache CouchDB NoSQL database. Here, I’m going to briefly present its strong points as well as drawbacks.Background Why using yet another NoSQL? CouchDB was chosen based on requirements and assumptions in the project. Especially, easy multi-master replication seemed to be attractive in the context of the project, which was supposed to be a distributed document database without any relations and rather un...