Comments on Carlo Pescio - blog: Notes on Software Design, Chapter 12: Entanglement...

Daniele: in this context, by "going meta"...

2010-12-01T12:55:02.636+01:00

Daniele: in this context, by "going meta" I meant primarily the use of reflection/introspection. There is no lack of literature on that, but here a few pointers:

https://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/twiki/pub/Courses/COMP205_2009T1/LectureSchedule/27-Reflection.pdf
simple classroom slides; they mention the gui builder, which is really a classic in reflection-based solutions. Understanding the architecture of design-time GUI configuration inside modern IDEs is now a prerequisite :-) to create your own modern, extensible UIs.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dCpsE2b26oAC&pg=PR6&lpg=PR6&dq=reflection+%22software+design%22&source=bl&ots=_m5qL0XQPM&sig=AHUEID558pd_Hfk6Vu3jbG7997Y&hl=en&ei=RzH2TIDtAc30sgbC26zaBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CGEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=reflection%20%22software%20design%22&f=false
more academically oriented papers, and unfortunately not fully available for free; if you have never applied reflection as a design technique, you may find some of those papers interesting. Look around, many have been made available by authors.

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/1484/1/MQ64060.pdf
a thesis-tutorial on reflection and patterns; this is a wide area where you can find many other papers.

As usual, once you "get" the concepts, the best you can do is learn more about some real-world application (I would start with that propery grid stuff in your IDE of choice) and then play with the idea in your own field.

As an aside, if you're stuck with C++ you'll find that it's lacking reflection, so your options would be rather limited...

Carlo, can you please provide some pointers on &qu...

2010-11-30T21:22:18.853+01:00

Carlo, can you please provide some pointers on "going meta"? (old blog posts, web sites, books...)

Fulvio: as you already know :-), "going meta&...

2010-11-25T11:42:45.918+01:00

Fulvio: as you already know :-), "going meta" can be an effective strategy to dampen the wave of changes. Of course, the strategy is only effective when the meta-level information is rich enough for your purpose. This is not always the case, but again, thinking this way may lead to a different allocation of responsibilities (more aligned with the actual forcefield, perhaps less aligned with the common way of thinking).

Is the example of function call by name and by ref...

2010-11-22T22:44:40.771+01:00

Is the example of function call by name and by reference comparable with entaglement of business systems? i.e. if each layer rely on the knowledge of fields number and fields name in a table they are entagled, but if we assume there's *some* fields and that we can retrieve their properties in some way, and so design our systems maybe it's less entagled, even if we fuse UI and business logic (don't kill me, it's just an example :))