Lars Behnke

I think in terms of technology Google's Android is as good as Apples iPhone SDK. However I believe Android won't attract many developers/companies as long as there is no decent way for selling custom software. I'd like to know if there is a distribution platform for Android software planned/available similar to Apple's ITunes.

Cheers,
Lars

Yes, you can use JEE5 APIs for your SCEA2 assignment. Two years ago I submitted a solution (part II) based on JPA and JSF. I passed with 96%.
Lars
[ December 04, 2008: Message edited by: Lars Behnke ]

Hi Martin,

The title of your book implies that agile software development is about coding style.

What's special about agile code as compared to conventional code?

In my understanding the focus of agile software development is on lean project managment and quality code is not a matter of PM methodology.
Do you disagree? I guess so.

- Lars

I tried Groovy a couple of months ago and I was really impressed by the power of this language. I feeled little bit like Java 10.0.

However, what was really really missing IMO is a good tool support.
As long as there no decent IDE many developer (at least I) won't use groovy for larger projects.

Whats your opinion? Which tools do you work with?

I'd be interested in the experiences you made with agile development as compared to conventional development in real world projects.

Did agile development save you time?
Did agile development have an positive impact on software quality?
Did agile development make your programmers happier (or did they burn out)?

Please share your experiences.

Lars

I've done Part II with Visual Paradigma for UML. First, I gave the community edition a try. After a couple of diagrams the exported images were crippled by watermarks. The "community edition" is virtually useless. If you want to get rid of the watermarks you must spend 59 USD for the "personal edition". There is still a "Not for commercial use" hint in the diagrams though.

Lars

You can put annotations on either field level OR method level. Most developers prefer annotating getter methods because otherwise method level annotations are overridden.
Sie also this blog.

Lars

I've put only those components into the diagram that are important for understanding the architecture. IMO the login box is not cruical. It's not a bad idea to add one or two lines about security in general to your comments/assumptions though.

Lars
(SCEA)

Congratulations!

It's perfectly OK to create an architecture based on JEE 5 (JPA, JSF etc.). I did so and passed with 96%.

Lars

You do not need to know any of the J2EE design patterns for part 1.
Only GoF design pattern are covered.

I have chosen to use JDBC over entity beans, do I have to justify my reasons for that?
Considering ... 1. Performace 2. Team knowledge 3. Entity Beans sucks (maybe I should skip this one). ...

I assume you mean "JDBC over session beans", right? Browse this forum and you will find lots of threads dicussing this issue. Generally spoken, you are probably better off, if you justify all your architectural decisions.

Lars

Sorry, I didn't mean 8bit but 4bit color depth.
Png is a free and improved replacement for gif which was protected by
a patent license until 2004. The latest versions of all common browsers support png. Older version of Internet Explorer have some problems with the alpha channel.
I submitted all my diagrams as png and passed.

Steps to decrease the color depth:

1. Open gif in IrfanView
2. Select menu item Image > Decrease Color Depth...
3. 16 Colors (4BPP)
4. Save Image as png.

Hope that helps
[ March 28, 2007: Message edited by: Lars Behnke ]

Web Services are not covered by the SCEA exam objectives. So you do not need to know about web services to pass. However, you are free to include web services in your architecture assignment (part 2) if you like.

[ March 27, 2007: Message edited by: Lars Behnke ]
[ March 28, 2007: Message edited by: Lars Behnke ]

my solution is currently 2MB and there is no way to reduce it since I am using GIFs already. I have about 10 images and I would hate to through some out only because there is a limitation of the upload.

No worries. Im sure you can reduce the image size to about 50 kB per image. Try this:
1. Open the gif with IrfanView or Gimp or whatever imaging software you like.
2. Decrease color depth to 8 bit.
3. Save image as png (png compression is better than gif).

That's it. Good luck.

Lars
[ March 27, 2007: Message edited by: Lars Behnke ]