Free ebook: The Software Development Book for Java Developers (With UML Examples).pdf, by Mark Watson

The complexity of information increases faster than our ability to organize and use it to increase efficiency and profit. We have lived through the dot-com hype and crash and most developers now have a more realistic view of the benefits versus costs of software systems. As the complexity of information increases so does the software required to automate information processing.

In today's economy, the savvy software developer asked herself "how can I earn money for my company", not "what technology toys do I want to play with today". There must be a reasonable balance between a focus on technology and a focus on business processes and problem solving.

Although this book is about Software Design, it is also about working in the IT field, dealing with competition from very low cost knowledge workers in countries with very low cost of livings, etc. Increasingly, "just coding in Java" is not enough: this book is based on my own experiences in moving "up the food chain" by both developing skills as a software architect and developing a passion for niche technologies (small market but little competition).

In the last few decades there have been many software design methods that have all promised the reduction of software costs. Most software developers have been involved with projects that used (in historical order) the waterfall method, structured programming, object oriented programming, various object modeling languages, Unified Modeling Language (UML), extreme programming, and test driver programming. Most developers will tell you that "their mileage varied" when discussing the utility and cost effectiveness of various software development methodologies..........more

A common complaint with methodologies that promote formal up front design is that the design process and documents are not kept up to date during software development. Modern design tools do promote "round trip" engineering to keep model design documents and code in sync but many projects still ignore the maintenance of design documents in the rush to get projects complete.

One of the great success stories in software engineering has been the series of design patterns books. These books codify and describe the designs for common programming problems. Developers reuse a proven design without having had to go through the "normal" process of making mistakes and then learning from these mistakes. In this book we will look at patterns of design practices that make sense in the reality of today's economy. These patterns deal with and answer such questions:

• What technologies to use?
• How role can Open Source (i.e., software licensed with a BSD, Apache, MIT, etc. license) and/or Free Software (i.e., software licensed with the GPL) projects play?
• Should the project be licensed as open source (I always refer to the union of Open Source and Free Software as "open source" not capitalized) or as a commercial product?
• How to implement data persistence?

This book is a hybrid, combining new ideas for a lightweight approach to using UML for design and discussing in cookbook fashion design recipes for a few problems that modern developers face. These six design problems will be discussed in the proposed book:

• Socket based client server models
• SOAP based web services
• Separation of content and control when creating applications with both dynamic web content and standard GUI user interfaces
• Abstraction layers between application code and relational database access
• Model View Controller design pattern for GUI applications
• Model View Controller design pattern for web based applications

The goal of this book is to encourage the reader to step back and reevaluate how they design and write software systems. The great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who died recently, once said "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." That is not simply a glib remark! Talk to successful software designers and developers and they will probably tell you that they do their best work in design and problem solving away from their computer, often taking a walk with colleagues or sitting outside with a pad of paper.

So, the reader is expected to think about the entire software design and implementation process in the first part of the proposed book and reevaluate how they do their work. The second part of the book contains case studies for six design problems.

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