Hi ranchers,
As part of my preparation to OCMJEA, I completed a “Java EE 7: New Features” virtual class today. I thought that my feedback will be helpful for those of you considering what course to take.
After you register and your enrollment is confirmed, you will be given the link to download an eKit (a fancy way to call two pdf documents - one being “student guide”, which is a ppt presentation converted to pdf, and another one is “activity guide”, which is step-by-step guide to complete labs. More of it later).
The course takes two days and consists of webex virtual presentation and the labs. For the webex part, you need to be able to download and install webex browser plug-in. I first tried it on Windows, since it is officially supported platform for LVC, but found problems with audio that I couldn’t solve, so I switched to Mac and it worked fine. It will be webex where you’ll be communicating with the presenter - he’ll be running PPT slides, sharing his desktop to help you understand how to do something, engage you in discussions, ask questions, you’ll be answering them, either verbally or by pressing “yes” or “no” buttons in webex, etc.
There’s also labs. For the labs, you’ll have to be able to run a browser-based VPN solution to oracle university web site. There’s a number of limitations I’d like you to know of:
1. On windows, you can only use Internet explorer. Somehow the VPN solution needs active-x on Windows.
2. On Mac, the VPN uses
java applets and requires Java 7. This means that you cannot use Chrome - Chrome does not support Java 7 on Mac OS X. Java 7 runs only on 64-bit browsers and Chrome is a 32-bit browser. So
you should use Safari. Now, on one of Macs I own Java 8 SDK installed, and I was unable to run VPN applet on that machine. I have Java 7 JRE on another Mac, and I was able to run VPN applet on it.
After VPN is up and running, you’ll be given a link to to download a “NoMachine” remote desktop application to your computer, it’ll your gateway to Linux Gnome virtual environment where you’ll be doing your labs.
In the Labs environment, you’ll find a NetBeans
IDE, a folder with java projects you’ll have to work with, a terminal, a firefox browser, and the pdfs with student guide and activity guide you’ll already have locally. Note that Linux VM where you’ll have to work can be very slow at times, screen refresh can take a couple of seconds, so you outta be patient. For the labs assignments, you won’t be coding anything from scratch, but rather make modifications necessary to implement the concept from the topic topic in existing code. These step-by-step modifications are all explained in “activity guide”.
The classes structure is that the host first walks you through the topic in webex, asking questions and explaining what is unclear along the way, then you do the labs assignment in the Labs environment (just to recap, it’s NoMachine virtual desktop through browser-based VPN to Linux VM box with Gnome). There are 6 topics in the course and 3 topics are covered each day, and there’s one long 1-hour break and one shorter 15 minutes break between topics. The host is very knowledgeable and really good at teaching stuff. In my group, there were 7 people from all over the world.
That is it, hope my feedback will be useful for some of you.
—
Cheers, Mike
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