Edited by Neil Anderson, Thursday, 12 Jan 2012, 17:33
You have these thoughts.
Last night I started to write the, proper, specification for version 1.0 of the solitaire thingee [codename: suzdal (not after the town! ]. I got as far as the input/output before hitting a problem.
I knew what I wanted to do, and describing this it wasn't too hard. But when I started thinking about the how, I began to doubt—I seemed to be designing a proprietary file format. Not good, brittle. That's when I started to think XML.
Java has plenty of libraries for writing and parsing XML, I'm comfortable with XML and XSL [the sitemap for my nonsense is an PHP generated XML file]. It would seem to make sense, would it not?
The problem is that it would be quicker to build my own format and move onto the stuff that I want to do. That's the temptation—should I spend the extra time [a quick guess-timate is about five-or-six times the time] to do things properly? Whether to build something that will last, rather than just work?
If you think that's this is a no-brainer then you don't understand the problem. To do this properly will involve me being mired in online documentation and tutorials, making hundreds of adjustments to lots of classes [because I've rather built-in my current format] and writing out sequence diagrams, and such, by the score. In short it won't be much fun.
Damn it! All this OU stuff has had its effect, I have to do it right. Time to crack-open the
DocumentBuilderFactory
Docs. and get planning...well, actually not yet. Because I have the spec. to finish first don't I?
i could use XML...
You have these thoughts.
Last night I started to write the, proper, specification for version 1.0 of the solitaire thingee [codename: suzdal (not after the town!
]. I got as far as the input/output before hitting a problem.
I knew what I wanted to do, and describing this it wasn't too hard. But when I started thinking about the how, I began to doubt—I seemed to be designing a proprietary file format. Not good, brittle. That's when I started to think XML.
Java has plenty of libraries for writing and parsing XML, I'm comfortable with XML and XSL [the sitemap for my nonsense is an PHP generated XML file]. It would seem to make sense, would it not?
The problem is that it would be quicker to build my own format and move onto the stuff that I want to do. That's the temptation—should I spend the extra time [a quick guess-timate is about five-or-six times the time] to do things properly? Whether to build something that will last, rather than just work?
If you think that's this is a no-brainer then you don't understand the problem. To do this properly will involve me being mired in online documentation and tutorials, making hundreds of adjustments to lots of classes [because I've rather built-in my current format] and writing out sequence diagrams, and such, by the score. In short it won't be much fun.
Damn it! All this OU stuff has had its effect, I have to do it right. Time to crack-open the
Docs. and get planning...well, actually not yet. Because I have the spec. to finish first don't I?