vladimir levin

I recently posted a tutorial about custom JSP tags I wrote. Feel free to check it out at:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~levinv/aphelion/jsp_custom_tag_tutorial/custom_tags_tutorial.html

I recently posted a tutorial I wrote
about JSP Custom Tags. Feel free to read
it at:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~levinv/aphelion/jsp_custom_tag_tutorial/custom_tags_tutorial.html

I am having a hard time getting motivated to study for the architect certification. If anyone in Calgary is interested
in being study-buddies to keep our mutual motivation up, feel free to get in touch with me. I do have the java developer (and programmer) certification and I consider myself to be an experienced developer, so I would look for someone with similar or more extensive experience to work with. Currently I am learning about EJB by reading the O'Reilly EJB book, so if you're interested in playing around with EJB and subsequently doing some research to prepare for the multiple choice exam, get in touch.
Vlad
(vladimir_levin@yahoo.ca)

I also talked about:
- local vs. network mode connections
- locking
- removal of deprecated methods
- gui design

This is a good question. There really is a spectrum of
choices here, ranging from hard coding everything to
getting information dynamically. I believe any solution you
choose will be ok as long as it is documented. Try to pick
a solution that is not complex (i.e. not too dynamic) but which
does provide reasonably good maintainability.

My user interface was quite simple. I did not include
the advanced features you describe. The most 'advanced'
thing I did with respect to the GUI was probably using
the JOptionPane to create custom dialogs.
For what it's worth, I'd like to emphasize that this seems to be
a fairly simple assignment and that the marking appears to be
quite lenient. It's not an invitation to build a commercial
application with all the bells and whistles.
My personal goal for this assignment, other than just passing,
was to take the opportunity to consider different design
approaches (even beyond the scope of the assignment, but
these were not incorporated into my submission) and
to make my programming more disciplined -- forcing myself
to adhere to Sun's coding standards and 'refactoring' my
code into a reasonably clean, modular form.
From reading this forum and the testimonials of some people
who appear to have passed the scjd, I must say I think Sun
is *too* lenient in its marking... but certainly there is no
need to get very fancy. If you write a simple application
and document your decisions, perhaps mentioning directions
for improvement, then I have no doubt that you'll pass.

I do not have 2 PCs, but I asked a friend of mine who runs
a linux server to set up an account for me. I ftp'd my
server code to the linux server, and got the server running.
I then ran the client on my home PC against this server.
It seemed to work rather well. So I suggest getting a friend
who has a non-firewalled Internet feed (cable seems to work)
to run your server.

Peter, good point! You're absolutely right. Therefore the
only reasonable solution is to have a separate flag to mark
the database as being locked.

Originally posted by Peter den Haan:

Originally posted by vladimir levin:
[b]I agree with Lora that locking the entire database is
logically equivalent to locking each record.

Not entirely - while the database is locked, it should arguably not be possible to add a new record. This does not affect your corollary of course.
- Peter
[/B]

Terry,
What's next? I would like to get the architect certification,
but I haven't used EJB, so it might take a while before I
formally register for that. I might also go for the Jcert
UML exam, thereby getting JCERT level II and leave it at that
for now. Here is my score breakdown:
General Considerations(maximum = 58): 58
Documentation(maximum = 20): 20
GUI(maximum = 24): 20
Server(maximum = 53): 49

I agree with Lora that locking the entire database is
logically equivalent to locking each record. The
corollary of such logic is that one cannot lock the entire
database while any record-level locks exist.

Ricardo,
The essay questions are very straighforward and general.
I won't say what they were, but trust me they're pretty
obvious. As long as you write the assignment yourself,
you won't have any problems with those questions.
Documentation: I had a README.txt file which
contained exactly what the assignment asked for. It
was in the ROOT from where my assignment jar file was
expanded to. Also a DESIGN.txt file contained my
design decisions. Finally, I had a help folder which
contained an index.html file for user help regarding
booking flights, searching etc. This file was available
directly or from the fbn application using the Help menu.
As for the README.txt. I did not have any
batch files for setting up the environment. Instead I very clearly specified
how to set the PATH and CLASSPATH variables in the
command line before executing the application.

[This message has been edited by vladimir levin (edited September 22, 2001).]

My Data class was in a jar file that was placed on both the
client and the server. Make sure your CLASSPATH variable
is set properly to find the Data class.

I took a look at the JBuilder GUI just now. It has some
tabbed views, tree controls, scrollpanes, and some toolbars
with graphical icons. All these things are supported within
the standard Swing set of widgets... So maybe I good exercise
would be to try to reproduce the main screen of JBuilder
(without any functionality). As for the text editor, that's
a very advanced control to write. Swing does have a basic
HTML viewer/editor built in, but that's about it.
One piece of advice: I would separate your goals for
developer certification from your other goals to start
putting together a professional-caliber development
framework. I think adding too much sophistication to
the developer assignment would obscure the point of
the assignment, which is that you understand basic
programming fundamentals.
Vlad

try javax.swing.ImageIcon

Don't use network sockets for local mode!