Welcome to the Step Ahead Software blog

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This blog is where we'll keep you up to date with all the news and happenings, product releases and product updates of Step Ahead Software.

I'm your host, Chris, so sit back, relax an enjoy the journey!

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Java package name structure and organization - best practice and conventions

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When it comes to conventions regarding how to structure your packages in Java (or any other language in fact) there is a wide variety of opinion. Making the right decision can promote productivity, understandability, quality, flexibility and the construction of reusable frameworks. I've seen some people promote 'package by feature' over 'package by layer' but I've used quite a few approaches and found 'package by layer' much better than 'package by feature' but further from that I have found that a hybrid: 'package by layer then feature' strategy works extremely well in practice and here's why I think that's so. Package by layer then feature The 'package by feature' people tend to want to put all user interface, model classes, persistence classes (eg., DAO - if you're into self torture ;]) for a particular feature into the same package and according to many examples, the same directory. i.e. they don't us
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Classic software engineering mistakes: To Greenfield or Refactor Legacy code?

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Oh, the humanity! If we were not in the software engineering game but, rather, in the civil engineering game then the equivalent of this article would be called 'Classic Civil Engineering Mistakes' and contain graphic videos of buildings and bridges collapsing and thousands of people running for their lives. It's hard to get emotional about something you can't see Unfortunately software is a rather intangible asset that doesn't lend itself to dramatic and emotional visualizations. When it comes down to it the life work of a software engineer, when reduced to it's lowest conceptual level, is the specific arrangement of sequences of 1's and 0's on one or more hard disks (or some form of solid state storage) residing on a server or desktop computer. How those 1's and 0's get there and 'which' sequences work and which don't is not really a black art but it definitely requires some intelligence but surprisingly a lot more common sens
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The case against IP 6: When scarcity can be a good thing

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With IP 4's limited range of public IP addresses and free IP 4 addresses becoming scarce it makes sense that the world should migrate over to IP 6 ASAP ... or should it? What's an IP address anyway? A bit of background for those who did not know that the internet predated the world wide web by a good two decades or more: IP addresses are kind of like  a physical street address. You write a physical address of a place anywhere in the world on the front of an envelope, put an appropriate stamp on it and then one or more postal services around the world will cooperate with each other to, hopefully, get your envelope to the "TO" address you specified. A public IP address identifies a "place" (e.g. a web server) on the internet where internet "data packets" can be sent. There's a lot of different protocols that can be used to send data across the internet but at the lowest levels they are all based on a simple principle: The internet is basically on
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