Re: 1995 Developers Competition Update - 42 Teams,Japan,Languages Used

tom@dcs.pdial.interpath.net wrote with possible deletions: | Total cash prizes of $10,000 will | be awarded the top 3 teams. Gold medals will be awarded the best MultiMedia, | Object Oriented, Rapid Application Development and Client Server application. The specifications for the 1994 competition in fact prohibit _any_ object-oriented approach. This is because the fields or columns are blocked, the rows which go into which tables are specified, etc. Hence it can be _proved_ that a gold medal for Object Oriented application is a gold medal for something not object oriented. Maybe this explains why no Ada or Eiffel participants are interested, and why there is only one team using SmallTalk. For an application to be object oriented, the analysis and design phases would have to be done without being given a canned database design to implement. In other words, for the application to be object oriented the analysis phase must determine the problem domain, and the design phase must determine the solution domain. But the 1994 specs are just that and prohibit oo analysis or design. Hence the result would be a SQL solution written in Ada or Eiffel or BASIC or FORTRAN. If I were a judge, given the 1994 specifications any SmallTalk entry would be immediately failed because the analysis and design phases are crucial to oo technology. Furthermore, for a team to demonstrate proficiency in oo technology would require that they produce a class library of reusable components with which total strangers must successfully implement the given specifications. That's not possible. The assumptions in the 1994 specifications are also legion. For example, areas of improvement include normalizing the database further. But this assumes that the optimum approach is to use a relational database, rather than anything else. A number of the details of the 1993 specification are amateurish. For example, table names such as TableName (notice the caps) are not used in any standards. This particular important point is not a matter of style, but rather of readability established by many disparate projects, namely, TableName should be table_name. I believe the 42 teams are wasting their time on the 1995 competition. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Colin James III, Principal Scientist cjames@cec-services.com CEC Services, 2080 Kipling St, Lakewood, CO 80215-1502 USA Voice: 303.231.9437; Facs: .231.9438; ISDN: .462.1107 & .1448 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~