3 Misuses of Code Comments

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, July 1, 2009 @ 7:44 am

Photo Credit: by dpascoe

Not many people talk about good practices to use for comments in code. Many people see them as an extra or freebie, so not a lot of thought gets put into them. The truth is, though, that comments are a great tool for giving insight into the thought process when the code was being written. Unfortunately like any tool, comments can be misused.

Here are three of the most common misuses of comments which I tend to run into.

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Grails: Custom Parent/Child Aware Tags

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, June 3, 2009 @ 6:56 am

Recently, I needed to create a special tag in Grails which would render specific children in a way that is aware of their order. I wanted to stick entirely with markup (not passing an array to a tag), and also wanted to avoid putting lots of logic inside a .tag file. While it was possible to write a tag lib which first parsed the children in a "non-render" mode, I preferred a solution which did not require doing my own parsing before render. The solution I came up with isn't the most flexible, but it got the job done in a relatively clean way with minimal custom code.

The following is an example solution with the associated code and tests.
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Remove/Cancel Bubbling for an Event in Flex3

Anthony Caliendo, Thursday, April 30, 2009 @ 2:18 pm

I recently had an issue in flex where I needed the click event for a component in an ItemRenderer to not bubble up to the parent list. Since the click event was being dispatched by Flex SDK code, I could not directly do this by passing false into the event's constructor. I had hoped to find a property I could set on the object, something like "clickBubbles", which I could set which would accomplish this.

Either that property doesn't exist or I could not find it. My solution was to basically hijack the event and send an impersonator in its place.

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Unit Testing: Can You Afford Not To?

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 @ 4:43 am

50 Cent's unit test based savings

Unit testing is fairly common these days as more and more people understand the benefits; however, you may still run into a client or manager who is not convinced. These people tend to think unit testing increases development time and cost, or they feel that unit tests are redundant since a QA department is also testing the application. If you've ever heard "we don't have time for unit tests", "you're a developer, leave testing to QA", or "I'm not paying you to write tests" then you know what I'm talking about.

These encounters can be quite frustrating for a developer or project manager who wants to leverage unit testing. While there might be a temptation to just unit test anyway without the blessing of a client or manager, it is more useful to help these people understand why they are mistaken about unit tests. I have found that this misunderstanding is often because they don't realize that testing is actually a cost saver instead of just an additional cost.

But how to vocalize this point in a way they will understand?

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Notification Testing with PureMVC and FlexUnit

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 @ 4:00 am

One of the nice extensions available for FlexUnit is the ability to easily unit test event behavior using EventfulTestCase.

This library has support for testing Cairngorm, but unfortunately support is lacking for PureMVC. I searched for existing solutions which added PureMVC notification support, but was not satisfied with their APIs. Luckily, it was not difficult to write some code to support PureMVC which mirrored the API of EventfulTestCase.

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Grails: Delegating to GORM Persistence in Java

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 @ 11:43 pm

For a recent project, I needed to plug some Java code into a Grails app. I wanted to use GORM for persistence, but couldn't introduce the interfaces, proxies, and factories into the java code which is required for existing solutions to this problem.

Basically, my constraint was that the java code itself couldn't be altered to work inside the grails app. The solution I came up with is pretty simple, but works well.

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ActionMailer Callbacks: In the Spirit of ActionController Filters

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, January 21, 2009 @ 12:12 pm

One of the most useful features of ActionController is the ability to add filters before, after, or around actions.  This tool is made even more powerful by the ability to chain filters together.  Allowing an AOP approach is indispensable for addressing cross cutting concerns (or simply separating concerns), and is one of the things which makes a framework valuable to a developer (Spring is an excellent example of this).

A while back, I had a requirement to persist a record of which email addresses were sent an email through the system.  I expected to find callback support for ActionMailer, but was surprised to find that it didn't exist.

I had three options: put the logic inline in each ActionMailer method which is not DRY and muddles concerns, put the logic in the ActionContoller as filters which break encapsulation in terrible ways (and is at the wrong layer), or extend ActionMailler to allow callback methods.

I choose the latter...

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Getting Rid of the “handler.call: handler undefined” Error

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 @ 12:09 pm

If you're using prototype (or rails, which uses prototype by default), you've probably seen this javascript error before:

handler is undefined

While not particularly threatening (no ill side effects seem to occur), the error causes a lot of noise and, quite frankly, is pretty annoying. Fortunately, there is a quick and painless patch to keep your error log free from this bane.

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acts_without_database: Leverage ActiveRecord with Non-Database Backed Objects

Anthony Caliendo, Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 2:53 pm

ActiveRecord comes with a lot of nice things that aren't really dependent on having a database backed model. The most obvious example of this is the validation framework baked into ActiveRecord. Also, there are several plugins which add some useful behavior to ActiveRecord objects but don't rely on having a database.

In the future, I believe the rails team aims to make certain things more modular and easier to pull out and use separately from ActiveRecord (validation being one of those). However, if you are working on a project which is locked into a certain version of rails or you're impatient, there is a very simple plugin which can solve your needs.

Enter acts_without_database...
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Scriptaculous Drag and Drop with AJAX Update Fix for IE

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, December 17, 2008 @ 11:28 am

If you have used scriptaculous to do drag and drop interactions which result in a replacement of the DOM element you are dropping into, you may have noticed that you can only do one drag and drop before it breaks in IE. The problem occurs when you replace a DOM element which is defined as a Droppable; IE will fail because it will still have the original element registered as a Droppable but it does not handle the fact that it no longer exists in the DOM. Firefox and safari have no issue with this, so this is another frustrating IE specific issue.

Fortunately, this problem is easily solved with a single line of javascript.
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Subtle OpenGL Projection Matrix Difference Between iPhone Simulator and Device

Anthony Caliendo, Tuesday, December 2, 2008 @ 6:27 pm

If you are deploying to the iPhone simulator instead of to a device, you can get away with not loading the identity matrix for the projection matrix so long as you do not want to draw over any bound textures which are drawn.  However, on an iPhone device, you will notice some serious artifacting if you attempt this.  The artifacts will be related to the last drawn textures, even if they were drawn from a different application (except if the phone was turned off in the interim, in which case you will get a black strobe effect).

This implies that the simulator loads the identity matrix automatically for GL_PROJECTION when loading your application, where as the iPhone itself will maintain the matrix's state between applications.

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Installing Edge Ferret/acts_as_ferret

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, November 5, 2008 @ 2:12 pm

If you do a gem install ferret, you will be getting 0.11.6. The latest stable version of acts_as_ferret is 0.4.3. Both of these versions were released nearly a year ago in November 2007. Since then, there have been various performance improvements and bug fixes which you'll be missing out on. In order to get the latest versions, you'll need to do a little bit of work but I would recommend it if an update is feasible for you.

Since it will be the easiest, let's begin with acts_as_ferret.
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Speed Up Ferret/acts_as_ferret Bulk Indexing

Anthony Caliendo, Tuesday, November 4, 2008 @ 5:21 pm

Image by hyperhaus

Those of you using ferret 0.11.6 (the latest released gem) and acts_as_ferret 0.4.3 (the latest stable version) may have noticed that rebuilding an index can be painfully slow when working with a large number of documents. Even if each document contains a relatively small amount of text, indexing crawls with a large set of documents. The problem is a result of how bulk update works; "bulk indexing" processes a single document at a time! Fortunately, there is a simple patch which will provide a significant speed boost.

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Scriptaculous: Fixing Hover After Highlight

Anthony Caliendo, Monday, November 3, 2008 @ 11:34 am

One of the annoying things about the highlight visual effect in Scriptaculous is that it will break your :hover background-color CSS definitions. The occurs because scriptaculous sets the background-color style property of the element to whatever it was set to before the effect began. This behavior would be desirable if you're using inline styles or setting the style property through javascript, but you will run into issues if you're doing it The Right Way™ and using CSS classes and Element.add/removeClassName. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this problem.

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Making acts_as_ferret, STI, and DRb Work Together

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, September 10, 2008 @ 4:15 pm

If you are using ferret to index a base class which has subclasses using STI, you may have seen the following error once you start using the DRb server which ferret uses for production mode:
undefined method `[]' for #<DRb::DRbUnknown:0x2501bd4>

A quick google on this error will reveal a simple fix; however, this fix might not work for you (it didn't for me). My problem was a result of using the :models option when invoking #find_ids_with_ferret. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple workaround to make ferret play nicely in this scenario.

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