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Certification revisited

Posted by daniel on June 23, 2004 at 12:22 PM EDT

How do you decide whether or not to take certification exams and how prominently do you display those you've passed?

Eric M. Burke asks Does Java certification matter? He explains why he didn't continue his path of taking certification exams and then presents some reasons that certifications matter. My favorite is his last, "The mere act of studying for certification helps you learn more about Java." I think that studying for an exam is its prime benefit. A final exam can help you bring together ideas that you learned a piece at a time and help you see the bigger picture. Burke also acknowledges the more practical reasons that some companies prefer to hire certified programmers.

In Also in Java Today , James Gosling is interviewed in The Tools and the Trade. He mainly talks about the Microsoft settlement and his new role with tools. With regards to the settlement he says "We've been in litigation with Microsoft for many years and won every court case. When they offered us a huge pile of cash, we took it." For tools he notes "For quite a while, Java technology developers have been able to build extremely sophisticated applications, but the straight forward stuff was often more complex than it needed to be".

In part two of this excerpt from Steve Holzner's book on Eclipse, Steve covers creating Javadocs, refactoring, adding certain skills to your Eclipse toolbox, and customizing the development environment.

Bob Lee offers another application of aspects in today's Weblogs. In Refactor dynaop Factories using dynaop he shows "implement a factory that uses dynaop to create new instances of Foo with aspects".

Lance Anderson has the long titled post If you are writing J2EE applications then you should be using Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise. "If you are writing J2EE applications then you should be using Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise."

There are plenty of opportunities to meet the newly reformed education community. Daniel Brookshier lets you know the sessions and booths at which you can find the JELC in Education at JavaOne.

In Projects and Communities, Chris DiBona notes that the thousandth java.net project is a member of the Linux community. He also plans to run a BoF on Java newbies/Java on Linux at this year's OSCon.

Currently in the incubator, the UnifiedIO project allows random access to any data or stream (even over HTTP), and gives a clear difference between read only and read/write access.

Before you consider slimming down the JRE, MThornton takes a look at what is actually taking up all the room. In today's Forums, mthornton writes "The major components of the JRE (by size) are charsets.jar 5MB rt.jar 25MB consisting of javax 5MB (Swing 4.2MB) sun 6.3MB (security 1.7MB, awt 1.2MB, text 600K) com 5.4MB (corba 1.7MB, swing 2MB) java 3.9MB (awt 1.3MB, util 700K) org 3.1MB (apache 2.4MB, omg 0.7) Some items are in multiple trees Swing 6.2MB total Corba 2.4MB total awt 2.5MB total The only thing I am confident that I will never use is Corba."

Sutanu writes about a Lean and mean core Java saying " We must nuke deprecated stuff even if that means breaking some existing code. The java standard distribution should just include core packages, almost down to j2me java.lang.* java.io java.util java.security etc. ... and allowing full pluggability for whatever implementation of those api via the spi."

In Onfly classes, mrdavood writes "Bloated jre problem commonly arise when we face with clients ( with slow connections ) that tries to run applet or jws or even little applications they got from internet. ... I know that there are some tools that specify needed classes but we need some thing official with better quality embedded in JRE for specifying which classes it really need. ? "

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