Re: Code reuse - best practices

[Ray Ontko <rayo@ONTKO.COM>]

Hugo,

> Another thing, what about sqc vs sqh? I've never seen a sqh, but I see it as
> the naming standard on ontko.com. Is sqc the standard for PeopleSoft
> delivered programs?

We when we first started creating and sharing reusable SQR
modules, I don't think PeopleSoft existed.  At the time there was
no widely accepted standard for naming them, but they were often
called ".inc" files.  We thought that they deserved a file type
of their own.  They were sort-of like ".h" header files in C, so
we called them ".sqh" files.

Peoplesoft (or the people at MITI/SQRIBE/Brio) must have been
thinking along the same lines when they standardized on ".sqc".
I'm not sure what the "c" stands for, but I've always assumed
that it was SQr inClude files.

Regardless of their derivation, they're the same in spirit.

> I was wondering if some of you had experiences to share, success stories or
> pathetic failures, on that topic?

I don't know of any pathetic failures, but one failure is
to be too clever by half.  You can spend a lot of time making
a reusable module with the end result being that you
constrain or confuse programmers.  Having said that, I generally
find that people use too little reusable code.

My rule of thumb is that if you _want_ every programmer to
do something a specific way, write a module to do it.  Standard
headers and footers and layouts and get-the-parameters and
save-some-logging-information are good examples of this.

PeopleSoft takes this issue a little further than most
shops might ordinarily take it because they're trying to
be platform and database agnostic.  I'm not faulting them
for it; I would have done the same thing if I were in their
shoes.

Hope this helps.

Ray
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Ray Ontko   rayo@ontko.com   Phone 1.765.935.4283   Fax 1.765.962.9788
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