| At this point, the application infrastructure that you'll need is in place. You have Ant to manage your build and deployment processes. You have Turbine to deal with connection pooling. And you have log4J to allow everyone to produce nice, clean, consistent logging. With the infrastructure in place, you will be ready to start laying down code in the next chapter. The work that you have done here will pay off in simple, easy-to-maintain code and consistent application deployment. The nice thing about a well-designed framework is that, after it's in place, you rarely, if ever, have to worry about it again. And in a multiple-developer environment, knowing that everyone is building and deploying the application in the same way eliminates a major source of spurious bugs (the infamous "But it works fine on my machine" syndrome). LAZINESS AS A VIRTUE An important role in any software-development effort is the "tools guru" ”the person who keeps up with all the open -source and commercial tools and libraries while acting as an evangelist for those tools in the project. It's the job of the tools guru to keep the development team focused on solving the client's problems rather than reinventing the wheel by creating framework components that are already available from third parties. Larry Wall of Perl fame says that one of the virtues of a programmer is laziness. A good programmer doesn't write a piece of code if he can liberate it from an existing application or better yet, find a prepackaged solution that someone else has already come up with. In this chapter, you saw two examples of that in the Turbine connection-pooling module and the Log4J. But there are countless examples, from the Xerces XML package to Apache and MySQL themselves . Knowing what's already out there before you write it yourself can save you both time and frustration, and can let you concentrate on the business problems rather than the technology. | |
