I notice that the GUI aspect, though accounting for only 10% of the final score, is a common area for people to lose marks.
I hope it's not bad form to speculate on what the examiners might be looking for .... (no doubt a friendly mod will sort me out if that's the case).
NB: I'm in the early stages of
SCJD, so have no experience of the essay, or personal validation of my work.
So here's my list of my GUI priorities (in no particular order):
1. Clear screen layout, alignment, use of widgets.
2. Conformance to Sun GUI guidelines
As per this document.
3. Proper use of the TableModel, though even better, implementation of the
MVC Architecture 4. Usability - perhaps docking points for some features not being available (e.g. column sorting, record update, record delete ???), or (more likely ???) docking points along the lines of the following:
-1 point for every mouse click required after client start until the full set of records is displayed.-1 point for every mouse click to close the program (ignoring first selection of the "exit" command).Similar to above for "Search" command.Loss of N points for not being able to book a record from a table double click ???Loss of N points for not being able to use keyboard short-cuts for major features (from a list they have).Loss of N points for not being able to tab between input fields.Loss of N points for not providing feedback for long operations (perhaps they lock a record via direct interface access and then attempt updates/delete via your GUI. There must be many others, thoughts please.
I do believe that the points deduction is very specific, with little room for individual examiner subjectivity.
I'm also wondering about menus. From reading KS&BB it sounds like a menu is pretty much expected (lost points lost if not provided) and that menu must comply with standards ("File", "Edit" and "View", etc), with menu entries for "Open" and "Close". But we only have one implicit database (the fact that it is a file being no concern of the client GUI), so the "File" menu is irrelevant (actually, the Sun guidelines on this are far less stringent than KS&BB led me to believe so I'm not so worried about the exact menu contents).
