I’ve been very quiet recently; there have been a couple of reasons for this… one is that I have been wanting to slip some more certification under my belt. The others can wait for another post.
Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD)
I am using Eclipse 3.4, with Java 1.6 to build my project application. I have enabled most warnings in the Errors/Warnings and JavaDoc preferences. I am also using Find Bugs and PMD. I’m hoping that these will help me produce some pretty clean code and documentation.
Though I am finding it time consuming going through and populating my JavaDocs. The “Product Description” is quite vague, but indicates around 3500 lines of code and somewhere between 20 hours and 40 hours is reasonable to complete the assignment. Unfortunately I haven’t been keeping a very accurate account of how much time I have spent on this project, but I would expect it is over 40 hours. An hour here, couple of hours there; as with most development projects, contiguous time would be more efficient.
It seems that only a limited set of functionality is required from the User Interface, viewing all records, search, update and delete. Based on that my application is good. The scoring criteria is more daunting:
- General considerations: how easy is your code to maintain (80)?
- Documentation: instructions, javadoc tool and comments (50)?
- OO Design: Structure of classes and use of variables and methods (50).
- GUI: how well does it match the spec and how easy is it to use (70)?
- Locking: how does your locking scheme adhere to the locking documentation (80)?
- Language fluency: I don’t know how exactly this is measured, but it is worth (70).
I must get 320 out of the possible 400. And I am trying to get it done before the end of the year.
