Passed with 384/400 (B&S 2.3.2)

[John Donoghue]

I passed today, 4 weeks to the day (almost to the minute) from when I completed the essay portion (uploaded Thursday, took essay Friday).

Here is the breakdown:
General Con: 100 93
Documentation: 70 70
OOD: 30 30
GUI 40 31
Locking: 80 80
Data Store: 40 40
Network Server: 40 40
Total: 400 384

I have no idea what I missed on GUI. I implemented:
"Administrator functions" add, delete and modify contractors (in addition to list, book, and unbook). To aid in use, buttons for administrator functions could be shown/hidden via a check box menu item
"starts with" v. "contains" search,
"case insensitive" search
search on any of the fields
get all records v. refresh view from most recent search
sorting the table by clicking on a column header (I was proud of that--not trivial under 1.5)
Individual cell tooltips

In modify/add/find:
a button brought up a checklist of services offered (based on what was contained in the database)
another button brought up an editable combo box for locations

I had online help (it even went looking in the runtime jar if it couldn't find the help file)

Maybe it was over-engineered?

Thanks to all of the helpful ranchers, and a great big thank you to Andrew and Terry for the book.

Overall, I learned a ton. Much like having my kids, it was exhausting but ultimately worth it.

-John

[mohamed sulibi]

hiz;

congratulation;

i don't submit yet, but i provide just search button and book button and two text field for name and location, i think it is exactly as the requirement want.

what you think ?

Regards.
Mohamed darim.

[John Mattman]

Hi John,
Congratulations. greate score. Just wondering if you did logging?
If you did, Did you wrote one log file or one for client , one for server?

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John

[rohan tiwari]

congrats..great score.

[Mary John]

Congratulations.
Wonderful score...


you had a great gui implemented, I think. Now that scares me about my simple Gui. I too have just 2 textfields, a search and book button.
and menu bar with File, Action, Help.

[John Donoghue]

Mohamed and Mary,

Of course I don't really know what they are looking for on the GUI; if I did I would have gotten 40 on it

My current thinking is that it may be better to stick to the requirements and do a solid job implementing the basic functionality. I've read that the examiners can't reward with extra credit, so now I think it probably wasn't worth the time it took me to implement and test the GUI I submitted (it was worth it as a learning experience, so I'm not sorry I did it, but that's a different question)

I'd advise doing a rock-solid job on what you submit. Then in your choices document indicate that you considered some alternatives, and be clear *why* you chose the way you did. It seems to me that is part of the assignment. So I said I wanted good usability. I feel like I could have chosen to do a minimal interface and said I wanted to meet the spec and/or not confuse the users and/or not gold-plate. For me, it's hard to say that either choice is "wrong."

Maybe other ranchers have more insight, but that's what I think.

Thanks for the congratulations.

-John

[John Donoghue]

Originally posted by John Mattman:
Just wondering if you did logging?
If you did, Did you wrote one log file or one for client , one for server?

Yes, I used logging. I wasn't sure about it, but I posted a question about it around the first of the year and Andrew Monkhouse (one of the authors of the Apress book) responded and convinced me to include it.

Every class had a final static logger. The overall logging level could be configured through the GUI at start-up. Default behavior was no logging (Level.OFF), but I figured if I deployed this app in the real world, I'd want the ability to change the logging level--it's the kind of thing I see tech support walking the user through on the phone. Because the client and server are in different JVMs, they should have different instances of the logger (although they have the root loggers with the same name, they are different instances on different heaps).

-John

[John Mattman]

John,
Thank you for your reply. Good luck on your SCWCD.
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John