Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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Scott Bellware is right, but don't sacrifice the speed

Scott Bellware drops an excellent loooong post TDD, Java, and the Microsoft Visual Developer. I couldn’t have said it better myself, nor would I have tried considering how loooong the post is. (Did I mention it was a long post?)

The one thing, though, that Microsoft developers cannot lose in their pursuit of better coding practices is speed of development. If we end up similar to the Java camp in length of development time, we’ve lost the speed advantage and made up for it by NOT being cross-platform compatible (in the general sense). Everything we do has to be tempered by this fact.

Published Mar 21 2005, 01:46 PM by darrell

Filed under: TDD

Comments

Kai kaqu@genzyme.com said:

(This is a cross posting from http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/CommentView.aspx?guid=64e8f609-d613-4717-8424-41d498cb704e)

TDD is actually not about the “process”, it is all about clients and speed. It is actually those UP (UNIFIED PROCESS) (or RUP –rationalll UP) guys impose the “process” concept to XP or agile (OK, I should say, those XP or agile guys got into the trap, and responded the invitation!). In the beginning, the “process” is only “programming” (the “P” in XP is “programming”, not “process” ;-)

Seriously, Agile and RAD have a lot in common. The only diff is dataset ;-) RAD is dataset, i.e., no middle tier, only visual programming (i.e., click-and-drag brain-dead-fingers-only programming); while Agile is custom-class, i.e., middle tier driven, domain driven, use your brain.

Now, using brain is slower? I do not think so. Yes, brain-dead requires fast fingers, that I agree, I experience that also, trust me. Sorry for the smart-ass comments, but seriously, TDD is really about clients and speed, and delivering the exe’s.

Another thing, the Java slowness. I can share something here, as a converter or insider ;-) There are two java camps. One is J2EE, which is slow and “bad”—the exact “badness” Rocky points out about “distributed” (“Layering is almost always good, tiers are usually bad” – again, a confess, I read everything Rocky put there ;-) After two projects, I refused (try very hard, and succeeded!) anything to do with J2EE stupidity (it is just another extreme of MS VB’s stupidity, I guess all fools are alike, even they are on two extremes)! There is another camp, it is POJO (plain old java object); it is fast. In this camp, you have OR mapping (Hibernate), Springframework, AspectJ, and Jess. BTW, why CSLA is so great? Because it is aspect-friendly, or, close-to-aspect (I need a better word here, perhaps “pro-aspect”?). All those regularities and disciplines in CSLA, they are “aspects”. Here is a good book about aspect (sorry, in C# --oops, I mean in Java): http://www.manning.com/laddad