tag
Orm
- #6 7 min
The Importance of Being Idle
“Practice not-doing and everything will fall into place.” It’s good to be lazy. Sometimes, in programming, it can also be hard to be lazy. It’s this paradox that I will explore today — The Art of Being Lazy. Specifically, I’m going to dive into a design pattern known as lazy loading by discussing why it’s used, the different flavors it comes in, and how it can be implemented. Lazy loading is a pretty simple concept: don’t load something until you really need it. However, the philosophy can be generalized further: don’t do something until you need to do it. It’s this line of thinking that has helped lead to processes like Kanban and lean software development (and also probably got you through high school). Notwithstanding, this tenet goes beyond the organizational level. It’s about optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste. There’s a lot to be said about optimizing efficiency in a computer program, which is why The Art of Being Lazy is an exceedingly relevant principle.
- #1 8 min
Solving the Referential Integrity Problem
“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.” I’ve been developing my open source Android framework, Infinitum, for the better part of 10 months now. It has brought about some really interesting problems that I’ve had to tackle, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy working on it so much. Chicken or the Egg Although it’s much more now, Infinitum began as an object-relational mapper which was loosely modeled after Hibernate. One of the first major issues I faced while developing the ORM component was loading object graphs. To illustrate what I mean by this, suppose we’re developing some software for a department store. The domain model for this software might look something like this: