Pretty stoked that I found this park today; I realised after my last trip here that we were staying just around the corner!

I have not been doing particularly much recently – the only other exercise in the last month has been a mountain bike up Makara Peak in Wellington. The hill climb on a comfortable overcast day in Hong Kong took 30min and kept my heart rate above 180!

Many people were walking the tar sealed road that as several picnic areas, only a few ran/jogged. I stopped at a picnic area that also had exercise stations. Visibility was very poor. I am planning to walk to the reservoir at some stage and take a few photos. Perhaps also a picnic.

I am quite dissappointed that I haven’t got my online fitness log book running – these little sessions would look good in there.

I found the exam to be quite simple. But due to the duration that I took developing the assignment, my memory of some pieces was a little flimsy and I will have to wait and see whether that has much bearing on the outcome.

My advice: try and do the assignment in contiguous blocks, it will assist your memory and try and sit the exam within two weeks of preparing your assignment. The exam will test the pros and cons of your choices, but the exam will not be particularly tailored to your solution and you may be surprised by what you are asked 3 of the 4 questions I had to answer were related to the design of the UI, where I expected more questions would be more around locking, OO principals, etc.

I got the feeling that the questions were really just to ascertain whether you designed and built the assignment. I expect it will take about 2 weeks to get a result.

Create web service to return personal weather station or airport weather station data from wunderground.com.

The web service will return JSON or XML data. wunderground.com API returns XML data.

When a user request weather information for a location, the web service will return the closest weather information for that location that is available. If nothing is available, or the closest is deemed to be too far away, the user will be asked if this is good enuogh and a message will be added to our logs informing the application administrator that closer weather data is required.

If the user, or an administrator adds a new weather station, the longitude and latitude will be added to the database, as with the name of the station, a link, and an ID that will map to a file system location, when it was added and if the last update was successful. Weather stations once added will be updated every 3 hours, 8 times in a 24 hour period. These will be translated into JSON files when requested.

The directory system will be based on weather station ID and the date in the form YYYYMMDD. Each directory will only contain up to 8 XML files, relating to a single weather station and day. Each directory may also contain JSON files. Perhaps a PHP XSLT engine, or C XSLT engine could be used to generate the desired JSON and JSONP files. We may utilise a library such as Xalan-C to generate JSON files. I’ve investigated XSLT solutions and it appears that PHP has suitable XSLT functions. I will modify this procedure, but it shows that the functionality is suitable.

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();

if (!$proc->hasExsltSupport())
{
   die('EXSLT support not available');
}
// Load the XML source
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('test.xml');

$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load('test.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo $_GET["callback"]."(";
echo $proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText;
if(isset($_GET["callback"])) echo ")";

We will be able to resolve the closest weather station or stations to a particular point and (in our user interface) allow a user to select the favoured weather station.

TCPMon was part of the Apache Axis1 project, but it is now an independent Apache project. The only available version is 1.0, released in March 2006! TCPMon is useful for debugging traffic between any TCP client and server. You set up a local port and point it to a server and port. TCPMon then shows you the communication. Very useful for any TCP based project, especially so for SOAP.

It is quite strange to be building an application like this again, it is very similar to being at university. Only no tutors or lecturers answering questions or running labs.  But there is still an emphasis on writing good clean code and documenting it well. Working environments tend to be more concerned about the finished product than the underlying implementation; everyone likes a finished product.

Anyway, it will be good to get this part of the project submitted.

Unfortunately I can not upload my project via the prometric testing portal. Probably because I didn’t think there was a time limit on the project and my application has either expired or been lost. And to make things less convenient the sun ed secure website is taking forever, or perhaps it is just internet in New Zealand with xtra?

Update: Perhaps it is a database issue at the Sun end?

The connection to our customer database is temporarily down.

You may create a Temporary Account if you want to continue with the online purchase. This Temporary Account will be merged with your existing account when our database is operational. We will contact you with your order number when this is done.

Update: I emailed Prometric/Sun support and they have set up my access so I can submit my assignment, but they recommend doing this and then booking in for the essay exam at a testing centre – which leaves me a pretty tight time frame.

Firstly, I am using automatic upgrade (which is usually magic) and it encountered an error with a function being previously defined. So I had to do a manual upgrade, which doesn’t appear anywhere near as professional.

After the manual upgrade, I had a problem with the appearance of this blog. Looking at the output HTML I discovered an error was drawn into the class attribute of the body element. The function join was being called with the wrong parameters. After some googling and grep searches for information about which functions are part of the PHP and Wordpress APIs, it appears that the functionality of the Wordpress function attribute_escape or the hook body_class doesn’t exist anymore.

To fix (though I imagine I’ll need to address this next time I upgrade) I edited function k2_body_class in k2/app/include/info.php so the attribute_join is called with the output of join as the argument, not vice versa as it was previously:

   $c = attribute_escape( join( " ", apply_filters('body_class', $c) ) );

Perhaps an upgrade of K2 is a better idea?

1. General considerations: how easy is your code to maintain (100).
2. Documentation: instructions, javadoc tool and comments (70).
3. Object-oriented Design: Structure of classes and use of variables and methods (30).
4. User Interface: how well does it match the specification and how easy is it to use (40).
5. Locking: how does your locking scheme adhere to the locking documentation (80).
6. Data class (40).
7. Server (40).

The total is still 400 and you are required to score 320 points to pass. It is also a little concerning that unknown automatic failures will terminate the marking process and fail the assignment.

My project appears to work correctly, so now just tidying it up and making sure that I have got everything required to submit it.

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:

1. General considerations: how easy is your code to maintain (80)?
2. Documentation: instructions, javadoc tool and comments (50)?
3. OO Design: Structure of classes and use of variables and methods (50).
4. GUI: how well does it match the spec and how easy is it to use (70)?
5. Locking: how does your locking scheme adhere to the locking documentation (80)?
6. 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.

Apache Jackrabbit is a document management system that implements the API requirements of JSR-170 and JSR-170 is:

A Content Repository for JavaTM technology API. Specifies a standard API to access content repositories in JavaTM 2 independently of implementation.

This is of interest as the standard that all Java oriented document management systems should adhere.

So let’s write some hello world applications:

1. HelloWorld.java

package hello.world;

/**
 * Class will say hello to world.
 * @author James Little
 */
public class HelloWorld {
	private static String welcome = "Hello ";
	public static void main(String [] args) {
		if(args.length > 0)
			System.out.println(welcome + args[0]);
		else
			System.out.println(welcome + "World");
	}
}

2. hello_world.php

<?php
/**
 * hello_world.php
 * Author: James
 */
class HelloWorld
{
	// Resolve the class type
	public $class = "HelloWorld";

	public function __construct($argv)
	{
		echo "{$i} hello world\n";
	}
}

new HelloWorld($argv[1]);
?>