Community Member Profile

Recent Blog Comments By Hal Helms

• Tales Of Revolution And A Sense Of Community

  Posted on Apr 21, 2011 at 6:42 PM

  Major congratulations, Ben! And well-deserved.... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 1

  Posted on Nov 23, 2010 at 1:34 PM

  I really like the unless and if operators used like that. Here was some code I was doing last night: @super_programmer = SuperProgrammer.find_by_last_name( "Nadel" ) return false if @super_programmer.nil? Now, we know that given this *particular* search, it would... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 3

  Posted on Nov 23, 2010 at 11:40 AM

  Ben, The advantage of mixins over inheritance is that mixins get around the problem of not having multiple inheritance. Take the classic case of a Teacher class and a Student class. Now, we want a StudentTeacher. We want it to inherit from both, but single inheritance prohibits this. Mixins... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: Ruby - Day 1

  Posted on Nov 21, 2010 at 12:44 PM

  Ben, you can do a for loop in Ruby: for i in 0..5 puts "Value of local variable is #{i}" end It's just that most Rubyists prefer the (to my eye) nicer approaches such as range.... read more »

• Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide To Learning Programming Languages By Bruce Tate

  Posted on Nov 20, 2010 at 2:45 PM

  Glad you're doing this as a series, Ben! We get to be armchair explorers as you do the hard work. Thanks.... read more »

• Simple Neural-Net jQuery Pub/Sub Experiment With Propagation Logic

  Posted on Oct 19, 2010 at 2:53 PM

  This is all much better handled by having a guardian object (just my own made-up term) check to see if *it* should announce an event. Then let events be broadcasted. Page Controller: Well, I'll be! Someone just clicked the "Create New Customer" button. I should ask the Server Con... read more »

• Simple Publication And Subscription Functionality (Pub/Sub) With jQuery

  Posted on Oct 18, 2010 at 1:30 PM

  Ben, interesting stuff! I started to write a comment on two reasons why trying to prevent event propagation isn't viable, but it expanded itself into a blog post involving parallel universes: read more »

• jQuery Template Markup Langauge (JTML) vs. jQuery Templates

  Posted on Oct 10, 2010 at 12:29 PM

  Nice work, Ben! Many thanks for your continuing explorations.... read more »

• Building A Twitter-Inspired RESTful API Architecture In ColdFusion

  Posted on Aug 21, 2010 at 5:59 PM

  Ben, one thing I find helpful in creating RESTful APIs is asking the questions "When x (where x is some action) occurs, what is being created? What is being destroyed?" Helps to identify the true resource that should be modeled.... read more »

• Using Named Functions Within Self-Executing Function Blocks In Javascript

  Posted on Aug 16, 2010 at 10:19 AM

  Nice, Ben. Thanks for the smarts!... read more »

• jQuery UI 1.7 By Dan Wellman

  Posted on Nov 23, 2009 at 9:28 AM

  Thanks for the review, Ben!... read more »

• My BFusion / BFLEX Keynote Address

  Posted on Oct 24, 2009 at 3:36 PM

  Nicely done, Ben!!... read more »

• Ask Ben: Detecting When DOM Elements Have Been Removed With jQuery

  Posted on Jun 30, 2009 at 10:24 AM

  Nice job, Ben!... read more »

• Voiding Click Events Implicitly With jQuery Plugin: voidClick()

  Posted on Jun 22, 2009 at 12:37 PM

  Not silly at all, Ben. Very nice: it's on little things like these that large productivity increases are built.... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 3:56 PM

  @Brian Good point, Brian.... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 3:04 PM

  @Ben What's so wrong with inline queries? That IS an excellent question, Ben. I think the main reason against having them is that, IF that same query is needed elsewhere, you have duplication of code -- never good. But if the queries really have different purposes and only accidentally have... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 3:00 PM

  @Tony Then, I suppose, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. It is perhaps due to my initial experience of being a craftsman, but I find no appeal to these big "do-it-all" approaches, whether in methods or queries. My father used to say, of certain things, "It's too clever -- by half."... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 2:57 PM

  @Sean Yes, if multiple queries really have the same (or very similar) functionality, aggregating them into one or a few makes good sense to me. I've found it very helpful when making optimization implementations to ask myself the question, "Are these things that seem similar NECESSARI... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 2:47 PM

  @Matt I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on this. In fact, I've been secretly working on a major framework that will make all others obsolete. It's the ultimate in reusability, having a single command: do(). Now, granted, there are a LOT of arguments for this, but one can (hopefully) see the brilliance o... read more »

• Why My Queries Hate Application Service Layers

  Posted on Jun 18, 2009 at 1:41 PM

  Remind me again: what exactly is so great about reusable queries?... read more »