Vincent Brabant's Blog

April 2005 Archives

I am now a Sun Certified Programmer for the J2SE 5.0

Hurrah, Youppie, Yes, Great, ..

Today, I received my Examination Score Report where it's indicated that I am now a Sun Certified J2SE 5.0 Programmer.

I passed the exam the 1st February 2005.

Normally, we know directly, at the end of the exam, if we success or not, if we are certified or not.

But, in this case, it was not the case. I had to wait until today to know my results.

And I am now a Sun Certified Programmer for the J2SE 5.0.

But, IMHO, I would have failed.

I will explain you reasons why I have the status only today.
And why I would have failed.

Once upon a time, somewhere in Octobre 2004, I went to
a book festival in Brussels.
And I bought some Java Certification books for less than 5€.

# Mike Meyers' Java 2 Certification Passport (Exam 310-025)
# Sun Certification Training Guide (CS-310-025 & CX-310-027): Java 2 Programmer and Developer Exams, Second Edition

I was thinking that, for that price, it was always a good buy.

But I never look at them, until the 15 Decembre 2004, when Evelyn Cartagena, of Sun, posted this message: a call for candidates for the Programmer 5.0 Beta Certification Exam.

she said

Candidates will have four to five (4-5) hours to complete 138 questions. The time allotted should give you time to respond to all questions and provide your valuable comments while taking the exam.

After reflexion, I though it was a good opportunity. And for that price (in Belgium, it was only 40€), if I failed, it was not like I spend 150$.
It's always good to know about your knowledge level for your daily computer language. So, I decided to subscribe and start studying.

But the problem was the following: Objectives were not yet available. So, what to study?

I started with the great O'reilly book Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook. And I played with all examples of that book by using NetBeans 4.0. It was very useful because NetBeans 4.0 was already supporting the new JDK 5 language features.

I continued to study with the JDK 5, reading a nice French article of Lionel Roux (available on developpez.com), and by reading the draft of the third edition of the JLS (Java Language Specification), that was available at that url
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/java_language-3_0-mr-spec.zip.

(Please note that you can now freely download the PDF file. It is available at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/ ).

By reading those books, I learned a lot of things I didn't know about, before.
To be sure that I studied all new API of the J2SE 5, I also used a nice tool, called JDiff, that permits to see you on line the difference between J2SE 1.4.2 and 1.5.0.
So, I discovered that I had a lot of things to study.

What I forgot, and it was mentionned in the call of 15 Decembre, was that they posted, the 20 Decembre, objectives of the exam.

So, I was able to enhance my preparation. But the date of 1st February was there.

Continue Reading...

NetBeans Workshop in Luxembourg and Belgium

This week, Sun Belux invites me to a Technical Workshop, to celebrate the launch of NetBeans IDE 4.1.

They organized a Technical workshop on May 25 (Luxembourg) and May 26 (Belgium).

In the mail it was said

Please feel free to forward this invitation to your colleagues.

Because we are belonging to the same community, I can consider you as my colleagues.

More details and registration on the following page:

http://be.sun.com/nblaunch

P.S. It's possible to win a trip to JavaOne.

I hope to meet somes of you.

Vincent

Test your Java code on-line !!!

But what is very nice is that you have possibility to choose the JDK. So, you can decide to run your code by using JDK 5.0, but also by usng JDK 6.0.

It's really simple to use.

• Go to that URL: http://www.zamples.com/JspExplorer/index.jsp?format=jdk16cl
• Update the sample class
• Click on the Run It button
• Your class is compiled and executed
• Result appears on the right

Hereunder a screenshot of a little java class that display the version of the JRE, but also the parameters given as input.

Please note that signature of the main method is public static void main(String... args) {}

If you compile it with an old JDK, it will never compile. That new notation has been introduced with Tiger (JDK 5.0)

Note also that they are using build 13 of the JRE 6.0.

I hope they will update the used JDK with the last build available on java.net. That would be really great.

Wink is Great

NetBeans IDE 4.2 adopt a new graphic chart

UPDATE: It seems that they decided to use that new look and feel for NetBeans 4.1RC1.

NetBeans EDI 4.1 is not yet released that they are already preparing the NetBeans EDI 4.2. And, therefore, it seems they are reviewing the colormap and changing their logo.

Please discover what you can see now when you download the last daily build of the NetBeans IDE 4.2.

How do you like it?

What I would like to see in NetBeans 4.2 !!!

In his blog, Ludovic Champenois, one of the lead enginners on the J2EE functionality in NetBeans, asked what we (NetBeans's users) would like to see in NetBeans 4.2 or even NetBeans 5.0.

So, hereafter is my wish list:

• Enhancements
  • Please look at all issues marked as Enhancement/Feature in Issuezilla of NetBeans. And say to the reporter if it's accepted or rejected.
  • Enhance the Form Editor to support new layout introduced in Tiger but also new JGoodies.
  • Enhance the Code Formatter
  • Enhance the Refactoring (we have not yet the basics (Extract Method, by example)
  • Add all features of Tasklist modules (with display of PMD result, and proposal of suggestions ...)
  • Have capability to create our own Ant based project, or to modify a existing one. (Why I have to always do the same modification _add a new target that generate PMD, Checkstyle, and Findbugs report_ in each Ant script I created in NetBeans ? It could be simpler if I have possibility to modify the Ant script that will be generated like I can modify existing templates for classes, ...
  • Add UML Support with Reverse Engineering (Be able to create UML class diagram based upon your sources, or be able to generate a sequence diagram based upon the method you selected)
  • Enhance support of Annotation (@Interface), to facilite generation of new java source or directly bytecode.
  • Enhance the Metric Module to have nice graphics and more metrics.
  • Fix the SCAN problem each time we start NetBeans.
• Add Support for
• Maven as Project Manager.
• TestNG as Unit Testing.
• Hibernate
• Struts
• Spring
• JBoss / WebSphere deployement
• AOP
• Reverse Engineering of Unit Tests: Based upon a TestCase I created, the skeletton of the Class to test is generated.
• Transform the SJSC (Sun Java Studio Creator, aka Rave) into a NetBeans Module. So I will not be obliged to use two tools based upon the same core (the netbeans platform) for my web development and always be obliged to switch to the other one.
• The main enhancement that must be done is to give a better documentation and facilitate the creation of modules for NetBeans.

When I compare the number of modules created for Eclipse and the number of modules created for NetBeans, I conclude that creation of a module for Eclipse seems simpler than creation of a module for NetBeans. If you do no enhancements in that domain, you will never be able to eclipse eclipse.

Success for NetBeans 4.1.

Vincent

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.