[ajug-members] boolean best?

[Barry Hawkins]

     Excellent observation by Andrew and Tim; I've had developers jump  
on Enumerations (the latest shiny toy that feature-starved Java  
developers are overusing) and use them to replace lookup tables in  
databases.  Unfortunately, part of our *requirements* are that those  
same lookup lists be available to the other languages needing that  
information...which worked swimmingly well when they were database  
tables; not so much as a Java enum.

     My favorite part?  The main justification being that they can see  
the possible values in the auto-completion features of their Java  
IDE.  The followup question of "How does that work out for the Flex/ 
Ajax/etc. developers?" is typically met by silence and a puzzled look.

On Dec 12, 2008, at 11:56 AM, Tim Watts wrote:

> As Andrew points out the implementation isn't as important at the  
> conceptual
> representation. In my experience, a boolean is seldom a good choice to
> represent real world things. Internal object state?, yes; real world  
> state?,
> not so much. A robust application almost always has to allow for the  
> "Don't
> know" factor.
>
>
> On Friday 12 December 2008 10:25 am, AGoodspeed at cfglife.com wrote:
>> The most important thing is not how you implement it, but that it  
>> meets
>> your requirements. Certain applications may require separate sex and
>> gender attributes (and/or multiples for an individual, like birth,
>> current...) for example, and either of them can have more than two  
>> values
>> depending on the requirements.
[...]



-- 
Barry Hawkins
All Things Computed
site: http://www.alltc.com
weblog: http://www.yepthatsme.com