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MySQL

What kind of test do I need for my software?

Perfect Testing in Software

Introduction

Most software companies run in that dilemma. In order to write software that works, you want to write some tests. The question for many of these companies is: what kind of tests are most efficient for my business?

Here we talk about seven common test practices in the software industry.

1. Unit Testing

Probably the most used form of testing is Unit Testing. This is easy to write and very effective in discovering bugs. If you are looking at verifying correctness, this is 100% what you need to have to test your software.

Why is it easy to write?

In most cases, Unit ...

Safely Processing a Queue of Jobs

What is a Queue

In software a queue is a container which is used to add items on one side and remove them on the other in a very efficient manner.

Sorted Queues

When used by a Journal, a queue is often going to support some kind of sorted order. Some jobs are more important than others and these should be built sooner. In other words, we give those jobs a higher priority and we sort the queue by priority first then using the time at which the job gets inserted.

Note that the C++ std::queue and std::unque containers do not offer anyway to support a priority. Instead you have to use ...

Drupal Aggregator

The default Aggregator Drupal module does not work very well. There are several problems with the Drupal Core module, one of which we have not fixed in our version (i.e. the flatness of the item table.)

There is a list of the known issues and our comments and whether we fixed the problem:

Problem Solution in m2osw's version of Aggregator
Missing XML marker The <?xml ... ?> marker is missing from some RSS feeds, add it as required
Spurious data Some RSS feeds add spurious data ...

PostgreSQL and Drupal conflict

We have been running Drupal for some time now and we have noticed that it generates a very large amount of warnings in our log files.

The warning is in link with improperly formatted strings. PostgreSQL tries to follow the SQL specification to the letter and that means you cannot use the backslash character to escape special character sequences (such as \n for a newline character.)

I knew that in most cases the error was generated because of the function saving a full page or some other content in the cache. In that case, the system includes the characters: \012 and \015 (\n and \r.) That ...

Commercial license for odbcpp

In June 2008, Made to Order Software created a new software library called odbcpp. This library is an Open Source C++ wrapper of the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) library started by Microsoft in 1988.

ODBC hides the details of back-end database systems. In other words, if you support ODBC, you can effortlessly connect to a very large number of database systems such as MS-SQL, Access, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

odbcpp is an extension for C++ programmers. It is easy to use and it is a great solution to avoid many bugs as it will automatically handle all the possible ODBC errors for ...

Skills at Made to Order Software Corp.

Since 1999, Made to Order Software has served its customers using its extensive set of skills. The following is an incomplete list of our skills. Please, feel free to Contact Us if you have any question.

AJAX, CSS, HTML, XML, SOAP, LAMP… and now Web 2.0?

Dear reader,

Yes. With all these terms, it is quite easy to get lost.

As a developer, my skills are quite extensive. I started with Logo, learned assembly language, BASIC, C, C++… and all these other languages in between, those that most people pass by such as Ada, Eiffel, Icon… And the languages you kind of have to learn because you’re in it: Bourne Shell, configuration files for 100 different software, Makefile, etc.

And once you know all of these languages, you think you’re done. Well… Not quite!

The web has got it’s own set of languages! It