Re: Forte Management Queries (OOP)

Question

2. Reusable Objects:object reusability is ideal, however in practice it is rather
difficult to achieve, and unless there is proper infrastructure put
in place, dealing with reusable objects becomes such headache nobody
will care to use them....This problem is common to many of object-oriented development
efforts. From my point of view, the source of this disillusion in OO
approach is in neglecting the first, and the most important phase
of any object-oriented development process, I mean OO Design. To
make your class reusable you need to clearly understand in the first
place how and under what circumstances it will be used. After that
define its responsibilities, i.e. methods and attributes. Then
decide what parts of its behavior will need to be overriden in
subclasses and what attributes can be made private. Try to make
class interface as simple as possible.
Unfortunately, the design process may take a significant amount of
time without any visible 'hard-coded' results, and this is one of
the reasons why it is neglected so often.
Another important issue is the level of project's
'object-orientation' which is implicitly defined by project leaders
and correlates with their own OOP experience and knowledge.
Sometimes they seem to be afraid to implement OOP key features:
polymorphism and class hierarchy at full speed, which finally leads
to the hybrid design, i.e. structural programming implemented with
classes.
This problem exists not only in Forte, but in any OO environment.
Mikhail Schelkin
Senior Software Engineer
Conextions, Inc.
[email protected]
http://www.conextions.com

Answer 1

1. Remote Installation of Run Time software:have you looked into installing forte runtime (or your application) on a
network drive and having your users run the setup from that drive?
there are also tools like saber or sms that would allow you to remotely
manage your desktop applications. for example, you can programmatically
have saber check your desktop's version of forte and if the master
version, residing somewhere on the net, is more uptodate, reinstall the
latest version on your desktop....
2. Reusable Objects:object reusability is ideal, however in practice it is rather difficult
to achieve, and unless there is proper infrastructure put in place,
dealing with reusable objects becomes such headache nobody will care to
use them.... with that in mind, here are some suggestions which you may
already have considered:
- after through examination of how your organization intends to use
these objects, design them...
- assign someone as a class librarian who will be involved in the whole
life cycle.
- create a repository specific to your reusable classes.
- develop classes & TEST them thoroughly.
- export the project(s) out of your repository and check them into your
favorite cm tool.
- document classes and publish the document to the user community.
- have other projects contact your class librarian to obtain a copy of
the pex file containing your classes.
- make sure your class librarian keeps user community informed as to
what new or revised classes are available.
perhaps you are wondering why we should export classes at project level,
well, if your classes depend on service objects or cursors, the only way
to export their definition is by exporting at project level....
Regards,
Noushin Bashir
Born Information Services Group
Forte National Practice
[phone] ext. 4278
[email protected]