Modelling databases is not a simple task. Many times we found some misspelled words, mixed case words and some horrifying things on many databases of third party systems. My rules are simple to follow, and most of them ensures a well designed database, with special care on how do we query that database, creating reliable and optimised for speed table design and queries.

Many people know the Model View Controller architectural pattern. Another interesting pattern is Presentation Abstraction Control architectural pattern. We can implement it using Dependency Injection or similar Inversion of Control patterns. So, when we are modeling solutions, we many times leave the control or business logic on the Controller. This will guide us to a very coupled platform. Remember that any well designed architecture claims for cohesion instead of coupling its components. On this article I will try to analyze the use of IoC on the PAC pattern, so we can have more maintainable software components, mainly on n-tier architectures.

How can we measure the software quality? There are many perspectives on that issue of software development. Matthew Wilson has spotted some evaluations that we can follow to improve the quality of our code and bring us a wide perspective on what does matter when we are evaluating the software quality.

I’ve worked on FOSS for years. Currently I have two active projects pyxser and caffeine. Both of them requires a great effort to being completed. Take an overview on their development:

Dear pyxser users, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve released pyxser-1.4.2r. The current ChangeLog for this release is as follows:

1.4.2r (2010.02.10):

        Daniel Molina Wegener <dmw at coder dot cl>
        * pyxser_collections.c: Added constraint checks for NULL
        pointers removing nested statements.
        * pyxser.c: Removed nested statements.
        * pyxser_tools.c: Added constratints checks for NULL pointers,
        removed nested statements and added strict checking for lists
        since it was crashing with an ambigous list definition that
        can not be handled by PyList_Check().
        * test-utf8.py: Added tests to determine if it continue
        crashing with module serialization.

        Thanks to pyxser users for their feedback.

One of my most recent projects is a Meta-Parser. The core requirement is to write a dynamic parser, which can be configured, allowing the user to setup certain patterns around the given input and extract those pattern tokens to being exposed to other layers of the main project. Surely this is a challenge, and interesting part of the global project. I’ve finished to work on this part of the project, it is implemented in C++ as the client requires it, and I’ve made a simple model based on the PAC architectural pattern.

I don’t use recipes to ensure the quality of my software. Most of those development tasks to make the software a reliable tool are techniques learned along the time, without considering the methodology behind the software development. I can’t stand for any methodology as the better methodology that you can use. I just follow few commandments or rules on software development, and all of them bring me good results.