The author discusses how the use of generic programming in C++ can lead to conflicts with object-oriented design principles. He demonstrates how a technique known as type erasure can often be used to resolve these conflicts. An in-depth example is presented: any_iterator, a type-safe, heterogeneous C++ iterator....   Read Article.

C++ is a language for writing efficient high-performance programs, and bit manipulations are bread and butter of many such programs. This article presents a solution to the problem of constraining bit operations to allow only safe and legitimate ones, and turn all invalid bit manipulations into compile-time errors....   Read Article.

Have your cake and eat it, too, with STL extensions. In this chapter extract from his latest book, Matthew Wilson shows you how to take full advantage of the STL Iterator abstraction, without sacrificing block-transfer efficiency of Scatter/Gather I/O memory....   Read Article.

Object factories provide a useful abstraction for object construction. A special problem with object factories must be considered, however, when subscribing template classes with object factories. This article presents an overview of the quot;subscription problemquot; along with several solutions....   Read Article.

In this interview with Artima, Robert Dunne, principal software engineer at Paremus, discusses three levels of dynamism, and why it's most difficult to deal with quot;impolitequot; services....   Read Article.

Readily available frameworks and APIs can make developers very productive. However, they can also limit developers' imagination, explains Overstock.com principal software engineer Chris Maki in this brief audio interview with Artima....   Read Article.

Small bugs can sometimes lead to significant failures, especially when those bugs appear in production code. In this interview with Artima, Mark Thomas, Director of Java Technologies at IBM, talks about the potentially big implications of defects discovered only in a production environment, and what developers can do to mitigate such problems....   Read Article.

This article discusses how the RIFE Web framework, and its use of continuations to maintain conversational state, integrates with the open-source Terracotta clustering project to create highly scalable applications with minimal coding....   Read Article.

This article is a personal, behind-the-scenes look at BoostCon '07 from a veteran who has seen it all....   Read Article.

This article presents a flexible and efficient variation of the Visitor design pattern in C++ that accommodates arbitrary argument and return types....   Read Article.

Rich clients can not only provide more interactive, desktop-like, user interaction, but also have the ability to cache significant amounts of application data on the client and perform processing on that data. In this interview with Artima, Xoetrope CTO Val Cassidy explains how client-side data processing can help scale an enterprise application....   Read Article.

In this interview with Artima, Gemstone chief architect Jags Ramnarayan discusses the limits of database throughput, and what developers can do when their applications reach those limits....   Read Article.

Pervasive Software recently introduced a new Java parallel dataflow framework, DataRush. In this interview with Artima, Pervasive's CTO Mike Hoskins explains how dataflow parallelism helps speed up data processing by taking advantage of multi-core CPUs....   Read Article.

Business managers often rely on developers to obtain custom reports, or to implement business logic that operates on some enterprise data. Assisting management in such piecemeal projects is tedious and unrewarding for developers, argues Enterprise Wizard CEO Colin Earl in an Artima interview....   Read Article.

In this interview with Artima, Loren Corbridge, manager of Sybase's Eclipse-based IDE, talks about developers' increasing involvement in a variety of business and management tasks, such as data and business analysis, and about developers' changing roles in the enterprise....   Read Article.

In this interview with Artima, Andrius Strazdauskas, Gary Duncanson, and Daniel Brookshier of No Magic discuss the goals of Model Driven Architecture, or MDA, and explain why they think it can improve programmer productivity and software quality....   Read Article.

In this interview with Artima, David Intersimone, Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist at CodeGear, discusses the role of designing software using visual tools as opposed to coding....   Read Article.

Couldn?t make it to BoostCon'07, the inaugural annual Boost Conference? Here?s the next best thing--a lively trip report from one of its presenters....   Read Article.

Portlets define a streamlined way to aggregate content from several sources into a single Web application. In this interview with Artima, Brian Chan, chief architect of open-source portlet vendor Liferay, describes the use-cases for portlets....   Read Article.

Using Ajax toolkits is a popular way to make JSF components more interactive. But multiple Ajax toolkits on the client can produce unintended consequences, explains ICESoft's Steve Maryka in this interview with Artima....   Read Article.