When SCJD 5.0 will be available ?

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hey all.
will be a new cert for SCJD for Tiger ?
Max this question for you please..
will you write a new copy of your SCJD 1.4 book if a new cert is available ?
thanks.

[Anton Golovin]

Originally posted by John Todd:
Hey all.
will be a new cert for SCJD for Tiger ?
Max this question for you please..
will you write a new copy of your SCJD 1.4 book if a new cert is available ?
thanks.

There should not be as it is still Java 2 Platform. That's good news.

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi John,

Sun normally have a minimum 6 month period between the release of a technology and the release of the certification for that technology. To that end, they have just started looking at the requirements for the new SCJP certification.

So you would not expect a new SCJD assignment / grading criteria until at least March next year.

If this did happen, then a new book might be considered.

Regards, Andrew

[Fisher Daniel]

Hi Andrew,
It is recommended that we are doing assignment using J2SE 5.0 now?

thanks
daniel

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi Daniel,

No, you should not use J2SE 5 yet. Sun have a standard set of criteria they use to grade assignments, and these have not yet been updated for J2SE 5. You can use J2SE 5 as your JDK, but you should not use any of the new features.

Regards, Andrew

[Nicholas Cheung]

So, will there be any beta exam of SCJD Tiger?

Nick

[Billy Tsai]

I hope not for another few years

[Nicholas Cheung]

Why? We can get certify without pay.

Nick

[Sakke Wiik]

Why exactly shouldn't I use J2SE 5 features? I recently generified my code. Do you really think there is a risk to get less points doing so?

My instructions says:
You may develop your code using any implementation of the Java 2 platform, but the submission that you return must have been tested and shown to work under a production (not development) version of the Sun Microsystems' Java 2 platform and that platform must not have been superseded by a new production version for more than 18 months by the time you make your submission.

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi Sakke,

You are right that there is nothing to stop you using J2SE 5 or it's new features.

The concern I have (shared by a few people more knowledgeable than me on the real assignment marking) is that there are standard marking guidelines given to the code reviewers. While we would like to hope that all examiners would be able to read the new code, the potential exists for them to mark down a solution because they did not understand it and therefore could not verify that it did what it was supposed to do.

Generification is one of those areas where you would expect that your code should now be more concise and less error prone. But if an examiner does not recognise the new syntax, and is expecting you to do type validation / casting, then this could cause you to loose one or two marks.

The worst thing is that the only time you get any comments from the examiner is when they fail you on a "must" requirement. Any other pass or fail does not have any comments - you could have a perfect assignment but get a relatively low score, and have no idea why.

We all know that in the ideal world this should not be the case, but in reality, it might happen.

Regards, Andrew