TheRevoltingX

Spare the rod, spoil the child I'm from El Salvador and beatings are a regular thing for us. It's normal for us to start working at 12.

Now that's the extreme, but this whole don't hit your kids movement is an epidemic.

Interesting, thanks so much for the response. I'll keep this in mind as I continue to develop my app. It's still between custom byte stream, json, thrift, etc.

But MsgPack looks interesting as well and, if anything, these blog posts have brought it into the light for me.

I looked at the java class and what might help is if you can set a buffer size and use that buffer to store the data in the buffer and expand it if necessary. But that seems like a lot of work. But yeah, not sure if you can optimize based on usage patterns due to the constraint you said. In any case, great stuff and thanks for the info.

Very interesting discussion. I work on a 2D MMORPG for Android. This is extremely relevant to me. I have a few questions though.

What if you take compression and deserialization out of the picture? For example, in my server I have a hash like data structure that gets turned into JSON for browsers and byte array for mobile clients.

For example, because the data has to be transferred at fast rates and will be going over mobile networks. The size of the packet matters because every millisecond counts.

Then to read the data, I simply read the stream of bytes and build the objects I need on the client. This has to happen mostly without allocations for example on Android to avoid the GC.

So a few questions: Does deserializing JSON cause any memory allocations? If you're not tokenizing the data and don't need to parse it, will it be a significant gain over s serialized byte protocol or JSON?

In any case, I'll experiment on my end and perhaps blog about my own findings.

You don't scale a language, you scale an architecture.

Hard to be depressed when Jesus got you....

Not yet, right now I have no need to learn yet another scripting language. I've been spending most of my language learning efforts on Erlang lately.

I've used Ruby, Java, and Perl professionally and my favorite by FAR is Perl.

This post makes way too many assumptions as to the causes of Jeff's post. Reminds of psychology, complete reach-around post.

I don't know, I'm pretty bothered by this. I checked Google Play the day I purchased it and it was only available w/ a contract. That's why when I saw it at Fry's I bought it because it was unlocked. Should have waited two more days and gotten it at half price. In any case, I'm going to go complain to them about this. I believe they offer price matching.

Ugh, you gotta be kidding me! I just bought this at Frys for full price (that's 799$)

I'm going to go see if they price match since I just bought it this weekend.

Indeed, it looks like they're even using requestAnimationFrame. It's still really slow on Firefox, which I've found to be one of the worst offenders when making canvas games. The problem here might be fixed by splitting the physics loop from the animation loop. I think it's doing all the calculations as fast as it draws.

Out of all the languages I've used (C/C++/Perl/Javascript/Erlang/Objective-C/Ruby)

I like Perl the best and javascript+ruby the least.

Freaking amazing, I've been utilizing MVC heavily to develop HTML5 games. Mainly borrowing ideas from Android and iPhone development with their layout engines and staying out of the way as much as possible.

I don't think it's coming full circle. They're just properly separating the project code, so that the time critical code is in C/C++ while the scale/fault-tolerant code will be in Erlang.

Nope sorry, I've only read pieces of his Art of CS book, but I'm also interested in reading 3:16 which I plan on ordering soon.

It's supposed just pick out the verse number 3:16 from every book and join it with any history or texts associated with it. Kinda like sampling.

Mr. Knuth is a personal hero of mine both as a programmer and as a Christian. He's pretty awesome.

Same as @wallflower. Our team is really small (2) so we never really run into that.

I wouldn't want two devs working on the UI at the same time. It's kind of an unspoken rule because just merging anything UI related is a big pain.

Like from the web world, one dev would do the UI html and js, while the other would do the server logic and API.

I try to use the MVC model in my projects, where the XIBs and their accompanying .m files just have basic getters/setters and the xibs are rarely changed.

Nah, it was actually a basic form and tableview.

However, it did have in-app purchasing and that was tedious to implement.

Not code-wise, but fiddling with xcode/apple dev center to generate ad-hoc profiles and signing and transferring to the device.

That sucked up more time than the code, at least for the first prototype build.

It's so much easier when you already know how to program anything. I was a Perl dev and dabbled in Java. I was forced at my job to learn iOS and produce a specific app in less than 3 weeks. Wasn't pretty, but working under pressure can be good motivation too.

For normal interfaces XIBs are way easier to maintain and handle then a bunch of addSubView calls.

The only things that should be hard coded are interfaces that are too unique or exotic. Even then, XIBs allow you to place arbitrary UIView elements wherever you wish and you can get the best of both worlds.

Me too, I'm working on a 2D MMO for Android: http://developingthedream.blogspot.com

And it's a real treat to see a 2D game like it being made. Not to say other participants didn't have cool looking 2d games.

Honestly, that looks more like examples in a MAN page rather than explanations of an algorithm.

So, Knuth wrote it in 10 pages from the ground up?

But, the other guy just used unix commands.

I wonder how many lines of code all those utilities add up to.

Probably more than 10 printed pages.

I've noticed in my industry that those who can't program, manage.

Those who manage, tend to blog more because they have less to do in front of a computer.

Kind of a useless and filled with false assumptions.

My original point is that the process of bidding and having people who don't care about a project spear head it.

I suspected it was offshored because I smelled the rot, but looks like I was wrong. It was just the victim of the broken process.

That's what my rant is really about, not necessarily against foreigners. It's just that the process produces broken/poor software.

I'm not saying that it's true for every company, but it was true for CAT.

Hmm, I have been meaning to make a tutorial on something Android related. They tend to bring in traffic to my blog :p

Erm, what I mean is that foreigner as in not from the country the project is originating from.

To you, the American were foreigners which further enforces my point that working with foreigners in an issue.

I'm not saying that because I'm American my code is better. I'm saying that because I'm local and I care more I produce better quality.

BTW, in my story some of the most incompetent people were indeed American. The other developer did the best he could, and the recruiter too. The process was broken from the beginning. They wrote really bad documentation, and incorrect formulas. The source was bad, but it took much longer to get all the formulas properly documented and figured out.

Heh, I feel bad for any products you spearhead. Your definition of good quality is poor.

I am a professional Android developer. Something like this wouldn't take more than a day. It's a piece of cake.

What I suspect happened here is that the project was outsourced. These silly people tried to save money by hiring a foreigner to talk to another foreigner developer and get the app developed. To work on and a deliver a product these foreigners know nothing about.

A little while ago I had a little financial situation and was forced to take some cheap freelance projects. I was quickly picked up by a foreign recruiter and I took a couple of jobs really cheap. At the rate the Indian developers would charge.

I had to work on an app that was commissioned by CAT. The app was a paving calculator that was to be used by their employees.

This was seriously some of the worse source code I have ever seen.

I took my own personal time to rewrite the project. I also redid all the calculations and found various mistakes everywhere. I asked them to send me all the docs and had to redo everything from the ground up because these people were plain incompetent.

For about a couple weeks work I charged $300 dollars. I didn't care about the money, I just didn't want any of our road workers using a shitty and potentially dangerous application.

Correct results are absolutely critical in any non-trivial application. Acceptance of incorrect results just shows how low the quality grade is.

FYI, I'm looking at the source, and it's pretty basic. Nothing a high school student couldn't write.

It looks like the company that made this was: http://pixelbitcreative.com/ also: http://erg.com/

Lol, they don't even have a real site yet they specialize in Web Development. What a joke.

Too short! I was hoping for more tricks and tips. I started learning Android programming by making a game. (http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/) It's tricky to get things like multiple activities, dialog activities, efficient service communication. Then of course, multiple displays and sizes. Also, different keyboard layouts, etc.

Most outsourced developers are pure rubbish. I cringe when I have to open a project that was outsourced.

At the small level it's fine, but when building larger apps there are just too many barriers to make it efficient.

Including developer programming and communication skills.