If the Nouveau 6.916 is taught standalone as AD University did, "completion of a standard software engineering course as a prequisite" will keep out a number of people who would otherwise benefit.In that case, it would be helpful to provide a preliminary some-weeks 'bootcamp' style software engineering course before the one-year ordeal began. Such a course would also serve to weed out those from other fields with weaker tree building anhd debugging skills.
-- David R. Levitt, August 27, 2001
I worry about the RDBMS side here; it looks to me a bit as if it's being treated as a dumb data store, and is ignoring the integrity and logical aids that the relational model gives you. In particular, comments such as "No students discovered the table inheritance features of PostgreSQL, for example, and some built data models that could have used these features to great advantage," are very disturbing; that particular feature is not only a failed experiment in a non-relational data management style that's simply never been removed from the source, but is actively broken, allowing things such as duplicate keys.In doing "enterprise" applications, many of them with large web-based components, I've found the hardest part is producing a logical model of the business or service, yet that model is one of the most valueable things for both technical and business development. It's the relational model of data management that's given me the ability to work out and specify these models.
Building a relational model compares to developing in a non-relational way on an SQL DBMS in the same way that working in LISP compares to working in PHP3. All code in PHP3 is going to be bad anyway, due to the lack of power in the language, but the LISP programmers will at least do all that the language is capable of, whereas the PHP3 hackers will just produce a sad, illogical mess.
-- Curt Sampson, September 27, 2005