Ben Ritchie

I thought that there was a pool of questions and you get a random selection each time, so if you retake you expect to get some old questions and some new ones?

They get a thumbs up from me. I have been talking to WizLabs support this morning - I received a reply 3 minutes (!) after I hit send, and after a couple of emails everything was working within an hour, so no complaints here.

No connection, other than as a customer.

Ben.

It took me close to 18 months to submit FBNS - no problems, there's no time limit.

Ben.

Nick, I just tried to get my company to buy parts I and II together (being lazy - it saves me having to put in two purchase requests ). However, I just received an email from Prometric saying that I couldn't buy part II yet because I hadn't completed part I, so I don't think your plan is going to work either.

Ben.

I don't know Jabber, but Jabber and JMS seem to offer different qualities of service, so it depends what you need. JMS will give you assured delivery (i.e. guaranteed "once and only once") with persistent delivery mode, or "at most once" with non-persistent (yeah, I know about DUPS_OK, but I don't want to complicate it!). It can even be transactional, although it doesn't sound like you need it. You can use durable subscribers to store messages for clients even when they are offline (or if they crash and restart).

As far as I can tell from the website Jabber seems to have no quality of service guarantee, so you're not sure if your message will arrive or not. The client will also need to be online to receive. These may or may not be a problem for you.

Apart from that there's the usual JMS 'advantages' - J2EE (easy to publish to an MDB, for example), standards, provider-independence etc...

OK, another question. I work on a large product that has evolved over the last five years, and has lived through the release of Java 1.3 and 1.4. We specify a required level of Java, but the decision to adopt a new major level of Java has very little to do with new language features - unless new language features offer significant advantages when implementing a new feature (or, exceptionally, reasons to reimplement an old one) they will not be considered a reason for us to change. The main reason to upgrade is if some useful package is being brought into J2SE SDK (JNDI in the case of v1.3, JSSE/JAAS/JCE in the case of v1.4), which makes things easier from a service point of view.

If relevant features weren't introduced then we wouldn't move until the existing Java level went out of service (i.e. if it wasn't for JSSE we would still pre-req Java 1.3.1, which seems to still be supported by Sun). Once we have moved to a new major level of Java, we will start to use new language features in areas of new development (old code is unchanged unless it uses newly-deprecated methods; why risk breaking something that works?).

In the current climate, new development projects are uncommon - the vast majority of Java development will be focussed on existing projects - do you think that Java 1.5 introduces any new features (apart from the headline language changes) that would be a reason to upgrade from Java 1.4? Do you think Java 1.5 uptake is likely to be widespread?

So far I have been very unimpressed by Cade & Roberts' book. The coverage of topics is too lightweight to be sufficient for exam study, and if you just need a guide to what you need to know Sun's own SCEA Part I exam objectives are fine. Also, it misses out whole sections of the objectives (e.g. Messaging) and that's very poor for what is supposed to be a guide to the exam.

Maybe it is better for part 2? I hope so...
[ August 26, 2004: Message edited by: Ben Ritchie ]

I know some people think Swing is great, it can look good and it can be fast, but that's missing the point a bit.

The problem with Swing is that people keep on getting it wrong. It's not just that Swing is new, because it isn't any more, and, while things may be getting a bit better, Swing is still the cause of many horror stories with Java projects. If we assume that Java developers writing Swing applications are no smarter or dumber than developers working with any other GUI toolkit, then it suggests that Sun got Swing wrong from an ease of use point of view. Maybe that should have been the focus of Java 1.5 work, rather than a new theme?

I've never really liked Swing very much. The learning curve is very steep, and while it's very flexibile it also gives the beginner plenty rope to hang themselves with. Every developer I know has heard of a horror story, few like it and i've seen some truly awful, unmaintainable designs. In fact, Swing has something of a reputation for turning otherwise successful projects into unmitigated disasters.

As far as I can tell from Sun's website, the only change to Swing is a new theme, "Ocean". Has Sun missed a chance to address what many people think is a major weakness of Java?

I'm just a Java developer (I have never found the time to explore C#), but many experienced developers that I work with looked at C# recently and think highly of it, and most believe that it is ahead of Java. Is Java 5 going to do anything to change their minds?

Is the new Java tiger worth using if we are currently developing software using J2SE 1.4 comfortably and efficiently?

I was wondering this too. The lack of major changes in Java (at least, J2SE) over recent years has been quite welcome for us. I don't find that Java is missing much at the moment, maybe i'm just living in the past

Wow, that's great - thanks Wizlabs! 287 here I come!
[ August 21, 2004: Message edited by: Ben Ritchie ]

Max, your book is a lot better than "not too bad". It's a must have!

What is the need to use mq base java.

I would say that most new projects now would use MQ JMS, rather than the base Java client. However, the base Java classes were released first and there are many projects using them, so they are still supported. They are also a bit more natural for people coming from a traditional MQ background, and there are some MQ features that can only be used from the base Java classes (e.g. distribution lists) and these may sometimes be important.

It seems that the certmanager.net/sun database is being updated very slowly at the moment - I had my results on certmanager.net/sun_assignment more than a week ago, still no update on /sun