chuqui asks: "I'm looking for some help from the /. group mind. I have a consulting opportunity that involves a large, complex system. Designing and building this beast is going to require a wad O'documentation, and I'm looking for ideas and tools to help deal with this, especially with flow diagrams and flow charts (I could adapt a traditional flowcharting tool, but these are more process diagrams than code flowcharts), and some way of documenting a good sized SQL system, with the schema, the tables and the connections..." If there is a single tool that can do all this, I would be pleasantly surprised, but I'm sure that there is a decent suite of tools that can be collected from the Open Source Software Catalog that would be perfect for this type of work. Right?

sireenmalik asks: "Of late I have become interested in this field of research namely Event Correlation on a Distributed Network System. The more I read about it, the more ignorant I feel. There is so much to it: distributed network systems, databasing, artifical intelligence (neural networks, baysian belief networks, rule based,etc.), software engineering, computer science, telecommmunication....etc. If I were to really attack it from a programming point of view, can somebody tell me what tools and languages should I use? I suppose it will be a realtime environment. Academicians support ADA but I can't figure how the artificial intelligence part will be done. If I use PROLOG/LISP I get into HEAP management business which really is a dragon for realtime systems. C/C++ .. Java....? To add the list I also know about the diverse implementations using JIRO (from SUN), ECDL (from HP), RAPIDE (from Stanford.edu), JAVA Management API, ELAVA, GEM Language, MODEL Language, IF/PROLOG......and the list goes on and on and on! It's interesting as well as confusing (I can't help but agree here). Let's talk about it. Maybe something useful happens here?"

tshieh asks: "I'm trying to add XML-configurability to a Java application, and I'm trying to figure out which XML parser I should use. Any thoughts on whether I would be better off using Xerces, expat, XML4J, or JDOM (or any others)? So far, I've decided to use DOM rather than SAX since I've heard that DOM is easier to use and I don't anticipate my configuration file becoming so large that the slower and more memory-intensive DOM parsing becomes an issue."

St0rk asks: "I am trying to make sense of someone else's Java code. He is another programmer in my team, but uses different programming style that generates tons of classes (just as the tick books say ;-). We are talking about 300 files, and approximately 430 classes here. I am looking for a tool/package/program that can take a relatively big amount of OO source code (Java classes) and build useful diagrams/documentation. Please note that I used 'useful.' Most of the tools out there can produce some hierarchy diagrams, but they either get too unreadable when one is dealing with so many classes, or miss too much (for example when a class A has a Vector that is going to be filled with objects of type B, there won't be a link between A and B genereated). It would be great if I can good prints as well. Any suggestions based on real life experience? (Rational Rose is too expensive, BTW)"

onnerby writes: "Zend finally has released Zend cache. It looks like a great booster for commercial sites.
They also have released a IDE for PHP-delevopers."

Prozzaks asks: "As junior developers, one of the task we will likely be called to do in a company is system maintenance (updating, bugfixing, adding functions to a existing system). I've already had a situation where it was necessary to do some maintenance, and after working a few hours on the system, I realized I was redesigning it from the ground up. The problem is that companies don't want to allocate the necessary resources to redesign a system. What are we to do when we discover code in the companies products that -really- needs a rewrite and management staunchly refuses to realize this fact?" There are times when I can understand the desire to go in and rip out code that you feel isn't operating as well as it could, and there are times when you have to sit back and weigh the benefits of a rewrite against any possible gains. The adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," applies here, but there are times when badly designed code that works now, will break later. Under what situations are rewrites necessary, and how can you get management to understand the need if it arises?

Mike McTernan asks: "I am about to start programming my final year project for my degree. I am aiming to write a lightweight application that will communicate with the user through some (yet to be dreamt up) novel speech interface. The program is to support the idea of applets that can be loaded and unloaded on demand, and should be reasonably lightweight. The target OS will be Linux on an ARM based board. My initial considerations were to use Java, since Reflection allows easy opening of new class files at runtime, but Blackdown are only upto 1.1.8 on arm, and this doesn't allow WeakReferences that I would very much need to use for the unloading aspect. I thought about using gcj but this isn't upto Java 2 either. I then though about C, and it seems tempting and would give a much finer grained control over the application. In particular I think can do anything with dlopen() that reflection can do for me in Java."

leob writes: "FWIW, the 15th International Obfuscated C Code Contest finally came to a conclusion. Read the main page, or, get one big tarball." The contest took a little longer than expected, but the results are fine example of their craft.

eGabriel writes "One of the benefits of free software that I haven't seen explored here is that of the opportunity to study elegant, masterful code. Besides the fact that we can all share and enjoy applications, and reuse their source code, we can also simply download the code and view it for pleasure, to learn from masters of the art. Certainly there are different criteria for determining what makes a piece of code excellent or beautiful, and I am not as interested in discussing that. If however, anyone has found a piece of free software that serves as an excellent example for study because of qualities they as programmers hold dear, I would love to read that code also and be educated thereby. Equally interesting would be code that really is bad, as long as it didn't turn into direct attacks upon the programmers involved (they can't all be gems!) Any code that shows elegant and masterful design would make for excellent reading; the language in which it is written isn't as much a concern. 'Literate' code is a bonus."

That much software sucks -- perhaps most of it -- is hard to dispute. Except for the simplest programs, it seems like the price of complexity is a tendency to failure. Commands don't work, user interfaces are neglected to the point of ruin, and components of even the same piece of software often clash with each other. And once you start combining them and try to use more than one application at once, sometimes the best you can hope for is an operating system that neatly segregates the problems so that your word processor doesn't take down your web browser, your IDE or your e-mail client. At least those are desktop applications for individual users, though -- the trouble compounds briskly when the common faults of software manifest in multiuser environments, where one machine going down means a wasted time and frustration for a lot of people at once. In an effort to outline the ways that software could suck less is coding, reading and writing dervish chromatic.

dlc writes: "Linux Weekly News interviews Larry Wall. 'Until now, the process of the design of Perl has been evolutionary. It's been done by prototype and modification over time. I talked about becoming stupid, but I've always been stupid. Fortunately I've been just smart enough to realize that I'm stupid.'"

Choron asks: "Anybody will agree that Java Appplets are great for developing complex applications for the client side, with good (but not perfect) portability. Now apart from Tcl/Tk or esoteric technology such as embedded Inferno or developing a plugin (so much for the portability), are there other solutions for developing both portable and advanced GUI applications embedded in a browser?" Currently, I think Java applets are the only way to do client-side applets with any degree of portability, but who is to say that this will always be the case. What may the future hold for applets, and will Java be the sole driving force behind the technology?

redcoat writes "After two long years, MySQL 3.23 has been declared stable. Improvements over 3.22 and .21 include rudimentary transaction support using the BerkeleyDB lib, full-on replication (master/slave configuration) and lots of other goodies. It's been a long wait, but a worthwhile one, no doubt."

An anonymous reader sent in an awesome article by Michael Abrash (If you don't know, I'm not telling). Tons of great bits in there, advice, anecdotes etc. Definitely worth a read if you are either a programmer, or a game fan.

buzzword asks: "In the current climate of Object Oriented everything, it seems that no one is bothering to teach structured programming anymore. I dimly recall that there were several design methodologies and practices associated with non-OO programming which were powerful and not as arcane as the current method fascist stuff. Are there any books still in print that address this issue?"

An 0xAnonymous 0xCoward asks: "I just wasted a whole day looking for a good hex editor for Solaris. I finally had to give up in frustration and disbelief. I found several hex editors, sure, some of which were even decent, but none of them had the -one- feature I was looking for: when I highlight the hex, the corresponding ASCII should be highlighted at the same time and vice versa. The only one that came close to providing this was khexedit, which looks excellent, but which I couldn't get to work on Solaris because it requires the [Qt] library and god-knows-what-else from [KDE]. Anyway, I finally had to resort to using a hex editor in Windows, all of which seem to have this feature. This seems like such essential geek tool...it must exist somewhere!"

kchayer asks: "I'm looking for an open-sourced system we can use to track workorders for help and problem requests on campus where I work. It seems that all products with similar functionality are designed more for bug tracking and correcting in the software development process: dcl, bugzilla, request tracker (not exactly what I want, or fully-featured enough), to name a few. While those are nice programs, and can be fudged to do what I want, I am interested in something specifically designed to track requests for help solving computer problems among students and our various staff/faculty departments on campus."

Leomania writes "In this press release on the mSQL (aka Mini SQL) website, it appears that mSQL is once again under development. A new release is slated for February 15th, and support will be available starting February 1st."

This "dynamic content" thing doesn't seem to be going away, does it? Web sites need to get smarter to handle the types of content that at least some people want to see on them these days, and the coders and designers behind them need the tools to make them so. Accordingly, Gavin Bong crafted this review of Web Development with JSP, which may be one of the tools you need.

One sprout out of our fine crop of Anonymous Cowards has this query: "A few months ago our company bought a e-commerce package from Inline. The trick to it is that it is written in their own language, iHTML. Outside of normal configuration issues, the package never worked right out of the box and trying to understand it was quite a pain. When I downloaded fixes for the package there were new features added which ALSO had bugs! I was just curious whether other Slashdot readers had any experiences with iHTML and whether any of you thought it was a 'sound' scripting language."