NX?

[jamel bal]

Does anybody know when SUN start with the new assignments. And how different they will be from the actual ones.
And would you please consider what another member Andrew Monkhouse said about the "NX". I think he has a better idea. Starting the subject with an abreviation of the exam will make it easier for us to find what we need.

Off topic question to the bartenders: instead of NX: in the headings, would it be better to have "FBNS", "HTL", or "CTX" in the headings? And no mnemonic for general issues? Otherwise we could get to a point 12 months from now where every post starts with "NX" and newcommers are confused.) Andrew

[Mark Spritzler]

In 12 months there wouldn't be a need for NX, since everyone would have the new assignment.
Because of the very nature of the similarities between all the assignments, knowing that member "A" has assignment "A" and member "B" has assignment "B" really doesn't make much of a difference. I still answer the same questions with the same answers. I haven't had a time where the specific assignment made a difference.
If you want you can title your threads NX:CONT for contractor assignment. The NX was just a suggestion not an exact rule.
Mark

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi jamel
I think the new assignments started appearing at the very end of March / start of April this year.
And how different they will be from the actual ones.
The major difference is the scoring (which doesnt affect the answers in JavaRanch). The actual assignments are just changes in the type of company we are writing the applications for - the problems that we get as programmers are pretty much the same no matter which assignment you get.
Regards, Andrew

[jamel bal]

Thank you for your help.

[Jim Yingst]

In 12 months there wouldn't be a need for NX, since everyone would have the new assignment.
I think you're dreaming here, Mark. More likely, in 12 months "NX" will also refer to some even newer assignments, and then we'll really be confused.
I haven't had a time where the specific assignment made a difference.
Differences are usually fairly minor, but they pop up in odd places. It even seems that there's more than one version of Contractor, with very slight differences in terms of names of methods or exceptions that may be thrown be a given method. Check out this thread for some examples. It's hard to tell how significant these are - e.g. careful study of my own requirements indicates that the whole concept of "DuplicateKeyException" is quite useless, and though I'm required to declare a class of that name and declare my create method as "throws DuplicateKeyException" there's no sane reason to actually ever throw such an exception. However it's possible that some other versions of the assignment are worded in such a way that it actually could (and perhaps should) be used - so I'm a bit leery about telling other people not to use it, even though I have no doubt about the answer for my own assignment. I wonder if these little differences are the result of minor tweaking of the assignment to make it "better", or if they're intentionally trying to foil collaborators by giving them assignments that look the same but are actually quite different in some respects. It's given me a certain paranoia as I think about it.