It's ironic to me that I had this same discussion with someone at work
just last week :)
I *was* in the "Maps are better" camp until a few months back when I
changed my mind, and it comes down to one thing:
Self-documenting code is better.
A bean is self-documenting in that you can immediately tell what its
attributes are and what types they are. I'm not even talking about
generating javadoc from the source either, but that's certainly a very
nice by-product.
Developers HATE documenting. I'm sure there are exceptions, but by and
large that is a very fair generalization in my experience. If you trust
a developer to document what is going into a Map, your asking for
trouble, generally-speaking.
I don't personally use an IDE, but I think Rick's point about
auto-completion and the like is important because many people *DO* use
IDEs, and if you give them a bean they can be more effective faster than
if you give them a map with some documentation on what they may find in
it at various points in time, and that's even assuming the documentation
is accurate :)
Especially in a team environment, I would always go with a real bean now
over a Map-based design, even though I agree with may of the points made
on why Maps are good. But in this world of trade-offs, I think you gain
more by using a bean than you do by using a Map, again, generally-speaking.
Frank
netsql wrote:
Larry Meadors wrote:
Hmm, of course, who needs things like refactoring, and compile time
name and type checking? That's why you have users, eh? They'll find
the bugs eventually. ;-)
Larry
Get/Set, Get/Set.... Half the time I have no idea what the db date will
come back as.
Look, I think some of you will belive me that I know well the benefits
of beans and that I have done at least several deployed projects w/
beans. It was a best aproach for the time. Now I have an alternative.
It does not change jUnit testing in anyway, I fire a populate/CRUDs and
assert. So using maps does not make me insane. :-P
Compile time type checking? Like in dynamic langs?
Most of the sucessfull p-langs are dynamic. In flash, array and map are
same class even. I envy their sucess. For example, the home page of
Spring is done in Plone.
So I just duplicate their aproach to get their Cost of Operation.
.V
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Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
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