Stacked smartness doesn’t add up

There is a strong urge to make software smart. Whenever something smart gets built in, it’s called a feature. Features of a software are effects you don’t foresee, but find handy for your use case. If your use case is impaired by a feature, you’ll likely call it a bug.

Some features of various software

To make my point clear, i have to introduce two features of software that are very practical for their anticipated use case and then change their context by adding another layer:

Ant filesets

If you use Ant as a build script language, you’ll find filesets very pratical. If you want to modify, copy or delete a bunch of files, you specify a root directory and some similarities between the files (like equal filetypes or names) and you’re done. Let me give you an example to show the use case:

<delete>
    <fileset dir="${basedir}" include="**/build.xml,**/pom.xml"/>
</delete>

This will very likely delete all ant build scripts and maven setting files in your project (so please use with care). Notice how the include attribute is comma-separated for multiple patterns. According to the documentation, the comma can be omitted for a space character.

Then, there is Hudson, a very powerful continuous integration server. One source of its power is the familiarity of configuration syntax, specifically when accessing a bunch of files:

The given text field specifies the include attribute of an Ant fileset. You immediately inherit all the power of ant’s fileset, but the features, too. Here, it’s a feature that two pattern can be excluded by just a space character. If your path contains spaces, you cannot express your pattern in this text field. When using the fileset directly in Ant, you can alter the syntax and use multiple nested include tags, but within Hudson, you are stuck with the single include attribute.

Struts2 internationalization

The second example is fully described in my previous blog entry (“The perils of \u0027″).

As a short summary: The Struts2 framework inherits the power of Java’s MessageFormat when loading language dependent text. As the apostrophe is a special character to MessageFormat, it cannot be used directly in the text entries.

The principle behind the examples

Both examples share a common principle: “Stacked smartness doesn’t add up“. What’s a feature to one software, may be a bug to a software that builds on top of it.

Software developers tend to “stack up” different third party software products to compose their own product with even higher-level functionality. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the context of the underlying products doesn’t change much. If it changes, features begin to behave like bugs.

The cost of stacking

Stacked products are likely to increase the ability of skilled users to re-use their knowledge. Every developer familiar to Ant will instantly be empowered to use the file patterns of Hudson. Every developer familiar to MessageFormat can produce powerful i18n entries that do most of the formatting automatically. That’s a great productivity gain.

But on the other side, if you aren’t familiar to ant when using hudson or know nothing about MessageFormat when just translating the i18n entries of a Struts2 webapp, you’ll be surprised by strange effects. And you won’t find sufficient documentation of these effects in the first place. There will be a link to some obscure project or class you never heard about, telling you all sorts of details you don’t want to hear right now. You can’t easily put them into the right context anyway. You will be down to trial and error, frustrated that your use case seems impossible without explanation. That’s a great productivity loss.

Often, you can’t blame any part of the stack, not even the topmost, for the occuring bugs. If a specific stack maintains and increases productivity, depends on the use case of the topmost layer compared to the underlying anticipated ones. If those aren’t documentated, its hard to notice the displacement.

A metaphor on software stacks

Whenever I hear about a software stack, a picture of a man on a stack of crates occurs to me. Here is the original photo of my thoughts.

What’s your encounter with a shaky stacking?

The perils of \u0027

Struts2 is a framework for web application development in Java. It’s considered mature and feature-rich and inherits the internationalization (i18n) capabilities of the Java platform. This is what you would expect. In fact, the i18n features of Struts2 are more powerful than the platform ones, but the power comes with a price.

Examples of the sunshine path

If you read a book like “Struts 2 in Action” written by Donald Brown and others, you’ll come across a chapter named “Understanding internationalization” (it’s chapter 11). You’ll get a great overview with a real-world example of what is possible (placeholder expansion, for example) and if you read a bit further, there is a word of warning:

“You might also want to further investigate the MessageFormat class of the Java platform. We saw its fundamentals in this chapter when we learned of the native Java support for parameterization of message texts and the autoformatting of date and numbers. As we indicated earlier, the MessageFormat class is much richer than we’ve had the time to demonstrate. We recommend consulting the Java documentation if you have further formatting needs as well. “

If you postpone this warning, you’re doomed. It’s not the fault of the book that their examples are the sunshine case (the best circumstances that might happen). The book tries to teach you the basics of Struts2, not its pitfalls.

A pitfall of Struts2 I18N

You will write a web application in Struts2, using the powerful built-in i18n, just to discover that some entries aren’t printed right. Let’s have an example i18n entry:

impossible.action.message=You can't do this

If you include this entry in a webpage using Struts2 i18n tags, you’ll find the apostrophe (unicode character \u0027) missing:

You cant do this

What happened? You didn’t read all about MessageFormat. The apostrophe is a special character for the MessageFormat parser, indicating regions of non-interpreted text (Quoted Strings). As there is only one apostrophe in our example, it just gets omitted and ignored. If there were two of them, both would be omitted and all expansion effort between them would be ceased.

How to overcome the pitfall

You’ll need to escape the apostrophe to have it show up. Here’s the paragraph of the MessageFormat APIDoc:

Within a String, "''" represents a single quote. A QuotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes; the surrounding single quotes are removed. An UnquotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes and left curly brackets. Thus, a string that should result in the formatted message “‘{0}’” can be written as "'''{'0}''" or "'''{0}'''".

That’s bad news. You have to tell your translators to double-type their apostrophes, else they won’t show up. But only the ones represented by \u0027, not the specialized ones of the higher unicode regions like “grave accent”  or “acute accent”. If you already have a large amount of translations, you need to check every apostrophe if it was meant to be printed or to control the MessageFormat parser.

The underlying principle

This unexpected behaviour of an otherwise powerful functionality is a common sign of a principle I call “stacked smartness doesn’t add up”. I will blog about the principle in the near future, so here’s just a short description: A powerful (smart) behaviour makes sense in the original use case, but when (re-)used in another layer of functionality, it becomes a burden, because strange side-effects need to be taken care of.

Hudson for C++/CMake/CppUnit Revised

A few months ago, in order to use Hudson as CI for your C++/CMake/CppUnit projects you had to do quite a lot of shell scripting. By now the situation has very much improved as some very useful plugins came into existence. To cover the situation described in my previous post you can now use a combination of the CMake plugin and the CppUnit plugin.

With these extensions Hudson gets more and more useful for C/C++ developers. Yet another new plugin that supports this trend is the CCCC Plugin which uses the CCCC tool to generate trend reports for various software metrics including cyclomatic complexity.

How to find the HTML Entity you look for

As a webdeveloper have you ever wondered how a special character has to be encoded as a html entity? There is a nice little tool available online that will answer your call for help. What makes the tool really rock is the simplicity and great incremental search. Typing in the letter ‘c’ will present you entities for “cent”, “copyright”, the greek “sigma” and mathematical entities like “superset” because the basic shape of the resulting special character is also considered. Upon entering a ‘b’ you will get the german ß as one of the results.This kind of search is almost a “do what I mean” feature and very helpful if you do not know exact substrings or meaning of your special character.

There is a Firefox-Extension and as a special goodie for our beloved Mac-users there is even a dashboard widget available that works without internet connection and is a bit more convenient to use than the web application.