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I've been lurking around for several weeks and have been totally blown away by the amount of information and how the community quickly responds. I have noticed that questions like this typically receive sarcastic remarks and sometimes get down voted. Please bear with me as I attempt my first post :)
I little background..
I work at a tiny software company as the "QA department". Our application has a MS SQL back to store customer data and short term loan information for financial service companies. I started working here 6 years ago as a gernal technician to provide support for their call center, so I've been overly exposed to SQL and have become fairly familiar with working with it. You probably wouldn't pay me to develop a enterprise level database, but at this point I've become familiar enough to do most things in SQL.
Why I'm asking my question..
I want to develop an application to store and track our software issues and new dev. I've done research on this website along with asking around and I still feel sort of lost as to which direction I should take. I want the core of the application to be pretty basic at first, to provide various screens between my entities/modules and to create reports to show their various relationships. In the future I want it to be more complex, to provide a web portal of some sort and to start getting into various complex QA software concepts. I've read around and it sounds like I might want some variation of C/VB for the windows portion, but all of the topics have sort of overwhelmed me. Do I want to start with a more basic one that was created 20 or 30 years ago? (I think that's C and C++, right?) or a more recent one like C#? Will I be able to develop a web portal with both of these? (by web portal I'm thinking it would provide access to our database of defects and have username/password sign-in). I've seen that the various .NET languages lean more towards web development, should I start with one of these?
I am at the very beginning of this and I fully understand that I'm jumping into some deep waters here. I want to make sure I don't end up spinning my wheels and that I focus my energy on something that won't end up being a bad idea in 1 or 2 years after I start. So far I've found this website very helpful, if I can pick a direction I know I won't have any problems finding what the next step is. It might help to know that I have no formal or informal programming background (if it wasn't obvious). I'm a 27yo techie who is starting his first venture into programming, go easy on me! Thanks for taking the time to read this :)
I won't recommend that you go to C, C++, or VB. C and C++ are used mainly for developement of system software, compilers, etc. VB is deprecated by now; there is a .net version VB.NET, but my preference is C#.
Looks like you are a Microsoft shop. Steer youself towards using C#. Visual Studio provides great support for development of Web Applications with support for holding state in entities backed by MS SQL.
I would start with a simple example as given in MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410597.aspx.
This example uses an Model View Controller based framework that is fairly easy to configure and use. They have great examples.
There is a free framework that also supports MS SQL Entity store http://www.coderun.com/ide/
Enjoy
Don't write a line of code. There are literally hundreds of open source and commercial software packages that already do what you want to do. You'd be better of spending time researching them and finding the package that most closely meets your requirements. A good solution will also be extensible enough that you'll be able to modify it to meet all of your requirements.
Since you work for a small company I can guarantee you that using your limited development hours "writing your own" will be counterproductive. You'd be better off adopting something off the shelf and becoming proficient at it. You'll learn more about developing systems like this once you've become intimately familiar with one of them.
Check out JIRA or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems for some other ideas.
For the benefit of your company I would recommend to use an existing
solution. But if you want to learn and build something of your own, I
would suggest that you check out some popular web application
frameworks, like:
Django
Ruby On Rails
Zend
Good Luck with your project!
Given that your intent is to learn and create something yourself I think you should consider a LAMP stack and PHP with one of the PHP frameworks on top (Cake PHP, code-igniter or the like).
The C++ route is a long hard way (C++ is my language of choice) to learn; as a learning experience I think you will get quicker and more satisfying results with PHP.
I also think that this is a realistic project for someone of your skills over a period of a 6 to 12 months - start with a simple requirement and then build it up to have all the features you need.
If you just want a bug tracking system obviously there are many options that won't demand any development.
How much experience do you have with things like installing Linux, Apache, Mysql, etc? If you are completely new to this, then this will be a much tougher task, because there are many layers you'll have to learn before you can even get to the point of writing an end-to-end application.
I would avoid C/C++/C# because there are a lot of things you would need to learn about basic programming before you even got to the stage where you could make database calls.
On the assumption that you don't have experience with LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/(Perl/Python/PHP)), my suggestion would be to start simply, by using a scripting language like Python or Perl. You can very easily get a database connection, and start writing queries, and extracting data from there. If you are used to Windows, I would install ActivePerl or ActivePython, and start from there. You can start building a command line program that does what you want, and then from there, you can move on to creating a web application that can do something similar.
Building a web application would likely be much easier than writing a Windows application, so after you have gotten comfortable with the scripting language, that's the direction I would go afterwards.
Good luck!
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I'm actually working for a little company of 10 people on the area of solar panels solutions in Chile. Am working on linux since 20 years now. When I studied programing I studied a lot with Eiffel which I found really a great language. Since, I'm frustrated from a language to another missing a lot of great concepts it offers like
real object (no string != String; ...)
multi-inheritance
polymorphism
genericity
contract.
Working now with Java because
its mostly free
the community for tutorials and helps is huge
its multi-platform
I'm looking for the pros & cons to convince the instances of my hierarchy (basically talking about justifying the price of the licences which are 1500$=>1y and 2000$=>2y) and to be a bit secured that I don't pretend I'll go with a solution I'll regret at term because it will be hard to get the support I need to get my solutions working. Is ISE Eiffel reliable for production use? Will I have to get hours of pain making work a solution?
What are the pros & cons?
Pros
Concepts helping me to write real good quality code (multi-inheritance, polymorphism, genericity, contract)
Pleasure to develop with such good tools
Quality and reliability of produced code
...
Cons
Poor community, meaning few tutorials
I'm not good in C so digging into the implementation of C libraries is something which will cost me (and to the company)
Price is high and has to be justified
My Curriculum will not be as well as if I have years of experience in Java
Formation of other programmers won't be easy if as most of them dont know these concepts
...
I also work in a small company and we have decided 2 years ago to make the move to Eiffel. We had the exact same questions as you are stating. We now have official licenses and support. I studied the Eiffel Web Framework a long time (from 2014) and knew that the only good way to be able to state that it can be used in production is to just do it.
So that is what we did and now the software is in production and working robust, safe and performs well. In production are web API's based on HAL+JSON and created with the EiffelWeb Framework and a self written framework extended with reusable domain components created for the companies goals.
So ISE Eiffel is certainly reliable for production use and the support is outstanding.
You won't have any hours of pain as you call it, but when you write software with EiffelStudio you get many hours of joy, but all the other aspects of software engineering will be as hard as ever ;-).
About your other cons, my two cents are:
For a curriculum, more important is who you are as a person and if you fit in the current team. In my opinion when someone is educated in a model driven approach and acts and thinks like that, can use that knowledge quickly on any environment. That for me personally is more important then being good at one specific programming language. Although I understand that in some cases we also need specialists to get a job done quickly. It all is a matter of personal choice, both are needed in the industry.
If you need other programmers that get in the team doing this, you can only work with people that want that. I know from experience, that some people want it and other people just won't. My advice is not to put energy into the people that do not want it. Work with the technology, show that it works and maybe they get convinced, else seek for others that do see this.
If the management is not behind the decision to work not only with Eiffel, but also with the ideas of Bertrand Meyer, then don't do it. You will find yourself always fighting against it, while it is very hard for others (not software related) to understand. It is a matter of trust, when there is no trust (at both sides) -> don't do it.
We now also get questions about how the Eiffel environment is handling vulnerabilities, which are compared to the way e.g. Linux and Java communities are handling that. Eiffel is not used as much as those technologies, but the Eiffel software itself is build on the strong quality core of the Eiffel method and language. This can simply not be compared with other environments. But again others do not understand this, so how is this going to be addressed? This is an example where you run into when you will be using the Eiffel technology.
A lot of words, but the plain answer to your question is just : YES it can!
It's certainly reliable enough for production use.
You may well have to write wrappers for C-libraries, depending upon exacly what you want to do.
You mention web services. There is a good web framework. But there is no support (that I know of) for W3C XML schemas, for instance.
I would suggest you try writing a small prototype using the GPL edition (you won't be distributing the prototype, so you will not be restricted by the GPL). Then you should be able to assess for yourself the suitability for your usage.
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We need to implement a one-form app (long form) that persists into Oracle DB. There are no Web services of any kind. The culture is traditionally Java-oriented here but it's open for suggestions.
What are the Pros and Cons of going with:
The traditional MVC Java stack - Spring, Struts2 or SpringMvC, Hibernate
The JS (modern) stack - AngularJS, NodeJS, ReactJS
Any clear explanation of the differences, with the Pros and Cons, would be strongly appreciated.
As I stated, I haven't been able to find a reasonable and understandable comparison.
It's apples and oranges. I'm only posting this as an answer because it outgrew the comment.
First to nitpick a bit, AngularJS is front-end technology, you can use it with any back-end technology (I use it with Struts2). So lets remove that from the comparison.
Second nitpick your comparison is more a JS vs Java choice. If you did your research you could be comparing NodeJS against Play, Vert.x, or similar. Not because those frameworks are "modern" but because they share some of design goals which made NodeJS what it is (Vert.x is very similar in intention, it has comparable speed, non-blocking design, and allows for polyglot programming).
But really there is something more fundamental than the frameworks... and that is the language. If you know JS and you've worked on the front end design did a mockup and then need to develop server side services and aren't more comfortable with another language, well it really doesn't make sense to invest in that heavy lifting when you can start doing something useful right away. It's also the same the other way (from the Java perspective) no matter what the framework you need to invest time, if you already know a Java web framework, why waste your time figuring out something else?
That last question isn't rhetorical, seriously why waste your time? In defence of keeping with JS, you can keep everything in one language, NodeJS is pretty fast, although keeping the comparison fair there are many Java web frameworks Struts2/SpringMVC don't have similar design goals to NodeJS while Play, Vert.x, and I'm sure there are others would be a more fair comparison. JS has a different way of doing things and if you have JS ninjas then it does make sense to do everything that way. As for why Java, it is fast, it has an enormous codebase, there are APIs and frameworks for everything, from meta programming, AI, robotics, security, obviously databases and everything common, there is enormous choice. It is more structured, in the end this means that months later you can generally figure out what you were doing and you can better share work and divisions of labour. But again, does any of that matter? I'm not looking to start an argument with the general public, only you know your requirements. Consider them and also consider human nature and take a reasonable course.
In my experience people use what they know, people I find are often splitting hairs over their favourite framework and someone else's for no other reason that that is what they know. If you're going to use some technical tooling advantage to try an get consensus that is highly unlikely to happen, and I would recommend first to look at your human resource capabilities; I mean you could write it in Java or JS, whatever but happy employees will produce way more regardless! What the majority would rather work with can't be discounted lightly.
This is not a question which stack you use. Pros and cons have nothing with the technology involved rather than humiliating the user experience by choosing one framework over another.
If you get any project from an idea to the production software you should know that many many, many factors apply on making decision on the architecture of the project. All it depends on the proposal that you should write first. The quality of this document will make influence on the further decisions and directions, feed-backs from the end user who is the consumer of the desired product.
No language, no framework, no programmer needed to provide you the user requirements. It's just the software that should do some things. That's all you need to know at the first time.
You can promise the user that you can build the software that is required, but you don't tell how it would be built, which language you use, framework, technology, resources.
You can see what other people is created and how it works and if it fits with what user is required then you luckily copy/paste. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in most cases and you have to pay for every brick in the building.
The most significant part over technology is programming resources. If you have such resources that you already tied a half which technology is preferred to use with the project. Technologies, languages, frameworks are different, and nobody can handle them all with expert level. You can build the software with one framework, then rebuild it from scratch with another and then you can compare. If you can't compare the costs used to build the software than your decision is just opinion based on other opinions.
The pro-vision occurred if you have experience of building production software on different platforms using different languages and different frameworks. Because many languages, frameworks are in most business problem oriented and recommended to use by experts as suitable to solve such kind of problems. There's no any point which one is better, because if you choose one that is more recommended than others and create ugly software using it you can't say that it's worse that others that are less recommended. On the other hand if you choose framework and create the great software that may be lacks some features available in other frameworks you'll win.
Don't play with the technology, use qualified consulting services. This is out of the topics of stackoverflow. Because this information is always commercial. Good luck with your endeavors to find the better software that suits your needs.
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I need to build a php app, and I was thinking about using a framework (never used one before). I've been browsing around some but most of them seems kinda complicated, I really liked what I saw about Symfony, but it looks like I will have to spend like a month until I really understand how to use it, and in one month I could code the app I have in mind 5 times without a framework. But I want to use one to "standardize" my code and prevent bugs.
So I was wondering if someone could share with me which php frameworks you think are easier to learn how to use.
My application will use mysql, and it will have some sort of "search engine" to search data that will be populated on the database using a few "scraper scripts" (that I also wants to code using the framework).
There are many questions answering this question here on StackOverflow and I was recently just in your position researching many different frameworks as I want to standardize my code as well.
I ended up choosing Codeigniter because I wanted something with good documentation, and that was very light (lighter == easier to understand IMO), and something that was not too strict. In Codeigniter if you really want to you can just code regular PHP and it lets you do that. I like this option because if I really get stuck on something, I just code it in raw PHP the way I know I can. I've only been using Codeigniter for a few weeks but the learning curve isn't too difficult and this is my first framework I've used.
Read through some of the previous discussions, and look out for ease of use advises:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2648/what-php-framework-would-you-choose-for-a-new-application-and-why
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249984/php-framework-decision-analysis-paralysis
Why do I need to use a popular framework?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/717836/kohana-or-codeigniter
If you want something easy to get started, you might want to look into the minimal frameworks:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/694929/whats-your-no-framework-php-framework
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/141945/lightest-possible-php-mvc
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3023818/any-procedural-non-oo-php-framework
But actually the big dozen are advisable if you want good documentation. Symfony and CakePHP are complex, CodeIgniter and the newer Kohana fork are beginner friendly. While there are many more to choose from. Pick a nice API, and maybe look out for one that explains the difference between MVC and MVP. Also for a lengthy list: http://matrix.include-once.org/framework/
My first choice would be cakePHP. Easy to learn, great documentation, api and a few good books:
Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional – David Golding (good; start with this one!)
Super Awesome Advanced CakePHP Tips – Matt Curry (good and free :-))
Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP – Chris Hartjes (not read yet)
Practical CakePHP Projects – Kai Chan, John Omokore & Richard Miller (not so usefull)
CakePHP is the best solution with a small learning curve.
I was in your shoes just 2 years ago. I personally chose to use Zend Framework. It's important to understand that ZF is built by the same guys who maintain and improve PHP itself! Just that gives it a lot more credibility.
When choosing a framework you should consider the following:
Size and Quality of the community - Being one of the most widely adopted PHP frameworks, Zend Framework (aka ZF) has the biggest PHP framework community; hence, most of the problems you will encounter will have already been answered. There are frameworks out there that are supported by just a few developers and if they happen to quit working on it, you're stuck with the latest version of the framework. This not likely to happen with ZF.
Documentation and Beginner Friendly - The ZF docs are pretty good, full of examples and beginner friendly. There's also a ton of tutorials and [quick start guides][2]. It's extremely easy to start up a new ZF app.
Investment - Sure you have to invest sometime learning how it works, but everything's like that in the software engineering world. You have to understand [OOP][3] and [MVC][4] before hand as well. Many people don't understand that using a framework to develop procedural-like code (instead of OOP) is defeating the purpose of... using a MVC/OOP framework! Therefore, it's important to grasp and master these concepts so you develop the best code possible. And by best code I mean
a) code that works
b) code that's easy and fast to understand and maintain.
This investment is well worth it since it will drastically increase
a) speed of development
b) speed of debugging and maintenance.
Also, take advantage of this moment in your programming career to also adhere to other common best practices (if you haven't already done so) by using:
a) Unit Tests - incredibly easy to integrate within ZF. Look into [Test Driven Development][5] as well.
b) An IDE - VIM, [Netbeans][6], etc
c) [Design Patterns][7]
d) Source Control - [Mercurial][8], Git, SVN, etc
e) Finally, keep yourself in the loop by [following what's going on the PHP world][9].
You'll thank yourself yourself in your near future! I know I did.
As no-one has voted for Symfony here i will and here's why. There are two types of frameworks, well a whole range actually but in the PHP/MVC area which is where we are in this thread there are Glue and Full Stack frameworks.
Zend and CodeIgniter are Glue and Symfony and Cake are FullStack.
Glue are the ones where you can pick and choose which components you can use and how much "standard" code you can use. These tend to have a gentler learning curve as you can pick the bits you like that help and fill in the more difficult bits with code you know.
FullStack means you need to use the lot and so the learning curve can be quite steep. Also with FullStack there can be a tendency to balk against the way something is implemented rather than just accept and flow with it.
Coming from a write everything myself background i initially favoured the Glue's but have now migrated to FullStack using Symfony 1.4 and 2 and Sinatra and Padrino. The extra speed and power the fullstacks give is not something i would like to give up.
One downside of CI is that it is built for php4 compatibility and so does suffer in a number of structural ways when you come to push the framework, Kohana is a fork that addresses this issue. And i dislike Zend because there are so many ways of doing the same thing that after a while the Framework seems almost irrelevant (Sorry personal rant)
At the end of the day use of a Framework is good because it adds a structure and can be a great aid to learning and the one to choose is the one you feel comfortable and are productive in.
There are many frameworks and several really cool frameworks.
After trying so many of them I think you should not start using any of them before finding best suitable to your needs.
You may find any other after choosing one so do not act quickly before choosing right one.
Before creating an application with a framework you should make exercises.
For me I started with CodeIgniter created one application and left second one in the middle, then passed to Kohana and started second application according to the needs.
CodeIgniter is the one that I prefer
The framework must have little learning and easy to expand. I am using http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/ for all my projects. There is no installation. Just has to point the frameworks naanal.php in your application's index.php and run it. The framework will guide you what to do. For the beginer, this framework is very useful to develop PHP applications. A sample application also available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/naanalframework/files/sample%20applications/wordpress_plugin_builder.zip/download
Years ago (pre-web) I used to be a Fortran developer (yes it was a very long time ago!) but these days I run a small non-IT business. I would like to develop a database application for my clients to access via a browser (or maybe down the line via a mobile phone). I haven't done any programming for a while apart from some VB macros in Microsoft Excel. I would be grateful if anyone could suggest the best language/technology to learn to get me heading in the right direction.
As Neil said in his comments there are dozens of different, valid answers to this.
Usually I would suggest going with a language you already know, but neither Fortran or VBA are really suited for this task, as far as I know.
Personally I would suggest Django, which is a web framework written in Python. It simplifies many common tasks and it is very well documented.
But there are many more possible solutions.
Before I started with a framework I'd break the problem into pieces. If you've never done anything with a database before you'll find that challenging enough without piling web or mobile on top of it.
Model your problem and get a good object or data model in place. Test that thoroughly without thinking about UI. Once you have that, perhaps you can expose it as services that any UI can call.
You'll quickly become overwhelmed if you try to do it all at once.
Here's another thought: If these are paying customers, why not do yourself and them a favor and hire someone that knows how to do this? It's great that you used to write Fortran, but if you haven't kept up you won't be doing your business any good by putting out a bad first effort for customers to see.
Do it right - get a professional. Do your learning on your own time.
You can use ASP.NET and SQL Server to get something online that will allow users to edit a database table fairly easily. They've simplified it to the point where you can drag and drop the necessary controls (GridView and a SqlDataSource for instance) and define your datasource in a wizard for most simple table CRUD functionality. Basically give users the ability to edit a table without writing any code.
If you need to do something a little more difficult it's easy to write code that will add functionality to the original drag/drop stuff you did.
There are lots of good resources out there for asp.net and C# also, so it will help you get up to speed quickly.
Keep in mind that I work almost entirely with .NET/SQL Server so my opinion will be slanted towards them...
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Looking for a tool to UI testing of a Windows (.NET WinForms) application. The idea is that the analysts will record the tests via some UI and it will be able to be played back over and over again.
Commercial tools are fine but bonus points for free ones.
Some others:
NUnitForms
Quail
I believe they're both free, and Quail looks really nice!
(I was going to just comment on an answer above, but ran out of room.)
We bought Ranorex, and I wouldn't do it again. Their licensing for 1.5 (what we're using) was unclear. Their written license was per user, their marketing said per machine. Still, enforcement was key-based, and not a big deal when a machine got wiped or a replacement tester came in.
For the 2.0 product, their licensing is now tied to the machine. Reimage a machine and you get to relicense it. I'm just not going to support that kind of hassle with my company's thousands of dollars, and we didn't upgrade.
For what they want for the product, a lot of the functionality could be easily written using the UI Automation Framework. Ranorex is a decent product, but I question its value for the money. We're moving a lot of our new tests to just coding to the UI Automation Framework, as we often end up modifying Ranorex-generated code anyway.
TestComplete.
You can definitely use capture-replay to capture and run the test script. But I would suggest that you must at least manually edit your scripts to make them
more readable
easier to maintain.
The good thing about TestComplete is that it is able to look into your form's properties, capture those properties so that you can refer to those properties by their name, not by just screen coordinates.
Like Tom E stated, do take caution while considering going down the record/playback path for test automation.
See Uncle Bob's article on Ruining your Test Automation Strategy.
The main problem is that the record/playback tools couple the tests to the GUI which makes them very fragile.
Uncle Bob's article does point out that some testing needs to occur on the GUI...but that he recommends stubbing out the business rule code.
Sorry I can't provide you with a specific UI test automation tool...but hopefully this caveat will help you make the best decision on how to employ the tool that you eventually use.
So far I have found:
Ranorex which looks really good.
Test Automation FX, also looks good and seems very well priced.
Microsoft's UI Automation Framework, which does not have the recorder but if I had to I could code one using this.
white which looks similar to the UI Automation Framework, but has an alpha quality recorder.
Comments please if you have used any of these.
At my company, we decided to go with http://www.sikuli.org/. We felt it was the perfect mix of cost (free), ease-of-use, functionality and extend-ability.
Sikuli is Python based (Jython, really) which is great and its open-source. There's a tiny bit of coding required, but it can be as easy as just calling functions. Their IDE makes it really easy to get started. It is not a record and playback tool. It functions based on computer vision algorithms - you give it screenshots of what to look for and it finds it on the screen and then performs the requested action (click, type, etc) on what it found. This is true independent testing since Sikuli knows nothing about the software its testing. It does not know about underlying APIs - it just does what a real human would do.
We have integrated Sikuli with Robot Framework, http://robotframework.org/, and have created lots of custom python code to build a robust testing platform. This may not be as easy as licensing a tool from a vendor but the time and talent investment in these two open source tools has been well worth it.
There are a bunch of similar questions on SO:
automate-interaction-with-a-gui-interface (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-windows-forms (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-gui
In my experience, there are a lot of good open source tools for the web, but not so much selection for open source thick client test automation tools. If you want good support with robust functionality, especially recording, you will need to look at the commercial tools (QTP, RFT, TestPartner, etc...)
You should have a look at http://opensourcetesting.org/functional.php A lot of tools are listed here and you should find something that meet your needs.
Visual Studio Team Test 2010 is coming with a tool for recording and playing back UI tests. You'll find some pointers at:
Introduction to Record and Playback Engine in VSTT 2010
Checkout Ranorex, commercial, quite expensive but powerful (not affiliated).
We were using Mercury TestDirector a few years ago and quite happy with it. (All the caveats as mentioned by others apply.)
Mercury was aquired by HP and the tools have been rebranded as HP QuickTest. Not sure how much has changed, but certainly worth a look.
I tried to include a link to the HP website, but the URL doesn't look too "stable". Not exactly a confidence builder ....
My proposal is QA Agent(http://qaagent.com/). It is free web based IDE for development of web automated tests. Basically you are using jQuery to develop your tests. You can run tests in your browser. It looks like a new projects, but I really like the idea to develop tests in the browser. You know how long it takes to set up your testing environment. With QA Agent it takes 10 seconds.