Steven Black

Steven Black

Steven Black is a software architect who has written a wiki and uses them extensively in project work.

Articles Authored

  • Wiki Technology for Teams

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2002 - July/August

    Lauren Clarke and Steven Black explore how wikis serve as dynamic, web-based collaborative tools that enhance software development teams by providing a shared, easily editable knowledge repository. The authors highlight wikis’ topic-centric nature, accessibility, and simple text-based editing, which foster continuous peer contribution and project continuity across distributed teams. They discuss the technical underpinnings of wikis, their benefits for managing diverse project artifacts, and the potential for extending wiki capabilities through structured content and parsing. Ultimately, Clarke and Black argue that wikis offer a practical, low-cost solution for effective team knowledge management and communication.

  • Server-Side XML and XSL Merging

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Fall

    Data in XML format will play a significant role for the foreseeable future.Moreover, it's clear that XML and XSL will play a significant role in most, if not all, of my future applications. Why is it, however, that almost everything we read talks about merging XML+XSL on the client side, which requires IE 5 or higher browsers? In this article, Steve shows how to apply XSL transformations on the server to get around this problem.

  • Some Pitfalls of Inheritance

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Summer

    In "Some Pitfalls of Inheritance," Steven Black explores common mistakes developers make when applying inheritance in object-oriented programming, emphasizing its static and inflexible nature. He advocates cautious use, stressing that subclasses should truly be specialized types of their parents and highlighting the need to separate interface from implementation. Black also warns against deep inheritance hierarchies, improper behavioral overrides, and overly visible members when extending classes. He recommends combining inheritance with composition for flexibility, proper method call-ups to preserve general behavior, and thoughtful interface design to create maintainable, robust systems.

  • String Processing With VFP

    Last updated: Friday, December 26, 2025

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2000 - Spring

    Steven Black surveys the performance of Visual FoxPro’s string-processing capabilities, using War and Peace as a large-text benchmark to compare methods for searching, locating, traversing, substituting, and concatenating strings. He demonstrates which functions are fast (e.g., $, AT/ATC, OCCURS; ALINES versus MLINE; WORDS/WordNum; STRTRAN/CHRTRAN) and warns about slow, MEMOWIDTH-sensitive operations (ATLINE/RATLINE). Black also offers practical optimizations (ALINES, _MLINE with legacy code, and efficient traversal) and concludes that modern VFP string manipulation is remarkably fast, enabling sub-second operations on multi-megabyte strings and rapid web-page generation.