Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Spolsky's article is timely #

I got a kick out of reading Joel Spolsky's latest essay on software development as craft and not an industrial process.  I nodded in agreement and recognition as described a problem that Tom and I are dealing with right at this moment:  that of keeping a user interface responsive while a file operation is taking place.  Most of the time, a file transfer (or a download of an image from the internet) can happen fairly quickly -- and the logic to handle that case is straightforward.  However, there comes a time (more often than a programmer might want!) during which the simple case no longer holds.  Spolsky uses the example of dragging a 120 MB file, an operation that does take some noticeable amount of time. In our situation, we deal with retrievals from databases that take more than 5-10 seconds.  At such times, we need to keep the user interface responsive, lest our user thinks that our program has crashed.  Handling such cases is what differentiates production from craftsmanship, argues Spolsky.  Writing this code takes a  lot of effort and not a trivial amount of experience and skill.  And it takes time -- something that many of us (managers, architects, and designers) have a hard time accepting. I recommend Joel Spolsky's essay to developers who are tempted to take shortcuts.  Don't!   Posted by Raymond Yee on 12/2/03; 10:33:05 AM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss