UrlyBird Passed (381/400)

[Nicolas Stern]

... Finally...

It took me a loooooong time to complete the whole thing - the better the feeling when it's finally completed.

I guess the effective time working on the assignement must have been 200 hours, but I spent a lot of time besides in readings, tutorials and prototypes. Professionnally, I'm not writing a lot of Java (I'm mostly in the databases fields) and I had a pretty steep learning curve.

Score in details:

General Considerations (maximum = 100): 100
Documentation (maximum = 70): 70
O-O Design (maximum = 30): 30
GUI (maximum = 40): 31
Locking (maximum = 80): 80 Data store (maximum = 40): 40
Network server (maximum = 40): 30

Javaranch threads helped me a lot. And, of course, Andrew Monkhouse and Terry Camerlengo's SCJD Exam with J2SE 5.

I ended up with 41 classes and about 4300 lines of code (incl. comments and javadoc comments, which I made pretty extensively).

Main patterns used: factory (whenever needed), adapter (to bridge the client/server to the RMI server), and singleton (for the class accessing the database file and the one keeping track of the locked records). All of this has already been pretty much discussed in this forum, and I did not bring any revolution, so I won't go into the details. Read Andrew Monhouse's book !

I was glad about the good scores in the doc, because I invested pretty much in explaining my choices and assumptions, and also in my userdoc. Both results in 22kb text files each. I also tryied to make the Javadoc as complete as possible.

I don't know where I lost points in the GUI and in the network server, but this could be that I was penalized for not implementing all the methods in the interface provided - there is a pretty long discussion on this forum about this aspect of the assignment on this thread:

http://www.coderanch.com/t/184224/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Should-lock-methods-callable-client

I think the most useful thing was using JUnit - it was always a good feeling to see the green bar after having left the assignment for a while...

He are a few posts that I found contained some useful information at some points during my development:

design (ken krebs):
http://www.coderanch.com/t/184523/java-developer-SCJD/certification/NX-Notes-design-passed

design (passed - thread with score 100%)
http://www.coderanch.com/t/188904/sr/certification/Passed-SCJD-Points

Design :
http://www.coderanch.com/t/182022/java-developer-SCJD/certification/data-model
http://www.coderanch.com/t/185590/java-developer-SCJD/certification/String-vs-value-object
http://www.coderanch.com/t/183273/java-developer-SCJD/certification/NX-Contractors-Interfaces-design
http://www.coderanch.com/t/183897/java-developer-SCJD/certification/NX-Someone-explain-facade-me
http://www.coderanch.com/t/179821/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Design-questions-RMI
http://www.coderanch.com/t/188154/java-developer-SCJD/certification/URLyBird-Why-not-come-debate

Locking, synchronization :
http://www.coderanch.com/t/179988/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Lock-Unlock
http://www.coderanch.com/t/179582/java-developer-SCJD/certification/passed
http://www.coderanch.com/t/187302/java-developer-SCJD/certification/URLyBIRD-lock
http://www.coderanch.com/t/185302/java-developer-SCJD/certification/NX-UrlyBird-reserve-requirement
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189118/java-developer-SCJD/certification/UrlyBird-locking-no-cookie
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189169/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Locking-strategy-URLyBird-ReentrantLock
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189213/java-developer-SCJD/certification/RecordNotFoundException-locking
http://www.coderanch.com/t/188135/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Multithreaded-connections-timeouts

Delete flag:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/188141/java-developer-SCJD/certification/URLyBird-mark-record-deleted-one
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189075/java-developer-SCJD/certification/DB-URLyBird-catches-SCJD
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189047/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Parsing-Data-File



Use of singleton:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/179686/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Tricky-DataServer-Thread-safe
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189057/java-developer-SCJD/certification/URLyBird-Singleton-pattern
http://www.coderanch.com/t/180998/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Data-wrapper

Use of a shutdown hook:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/184802/java-developer-SCJD/certification/stop-rmi-server

Exception handling:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/188723/java-developer-SCJD/certification/RMI-Adapter-Pattern-URLyBird

Find method
http://www.coderanch.com/t/189120/java-developer-SCJD/certification/RecordNotFoundException-find-method

Should lock methods be callable by the client:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/184224/java-developer-SCJD/certification/Should-lock-methods-callable-client

Cheers - Nicolas

[mohamed sulibi]

Congratulations, and thunks you for your help

scjp, scjd in progress ...

[Harish Yerneni]

Well done. Nicholas. What next?

[Nicolas Stern]

Hi - I just started preparing the SCBCD (I already have SCWCD), but I was considering re-certifying on Java 5 with the upgrade exam, since my programmer exam is now quite old (1.2) ...

Cheers - Nic

[Raghavan Muthu]

Howdy Nicolas Stern ,

Congratulations for the good score

Also thanks for the excellent help you have done here by mentioning the useful links

[archana kher]

Nicolas:

I have a query, Once you uploaded the assignment, did you get any mail from sun stating that your assignment is accepted and that you could take a exam? Please advice


btw congrats on the gud score.

[Nicolas Stern]

Hi archana,

No, I didn't get a confirmation email.

Once you've uploaded the assignement, you can register for the exam. AFAIK your assignment will be reviewed only after you've completed the exam.

Cheers - Nicolas

[Joe Harry]

Congratulations!

[Gabriel Vargas]

Wow, congratualtions.

[Kyle Cheng]

Congratulations, very helpful