Long time no see...

It's been quite a while (over a year, to be precise) since I've last posted to the blog. I took hiatus from writing mainly because of great changes in my life: change of employer, followed by change of martial status, job position and master's thesis subject. So you can imagine that all the adaptation kept me pretty busy :D.

I've also managed to pass two certifications in the meantime:

• Erlang Foundation Certificate (great fun! I hope to write about this more)
• Oracle Certified Professional, Java EE 5 Web Component Developer (scored 95%)

So, to reflect all these changes, I've decided to move my blog to a custom domain, and switch blogging platform to Blogger. I was quite satisfied with Wordpress.com, but I needed more freedom with editing CSS (12$ 'upgrade' for small corrections is too much I think) and using custom Javascript. I had some experience with customizing Wordpress blogs, so hosting one on my own would look like a logical choice, but I've opted for Blogger mainly because it's quite flexible and of course much easier to set up and maintain.

I think that great improvements will come to Blogger, as it has a huge user base and is an invaluable source of content for Google – so important in times when so much user-generated content is buried in uncrawlable social sites like Facebook. So I wasn't very surprised to see Google announcement on new features that will come to the platform this year. They look really promising – I like especially the user experience design borrowed from Google Docs – the more document-oriented interface seems cleaner, exposing the posts as the most important element and I think that's the way to go. Also, the functionality of blog exploration based on topic clustering looks pretty cool (although everything depends on execution, so we need to wait to see it in action).

Transition to Blogger went pretty smooth, thanks to this conversion utility. I simply needed to export my blog from Wordpress, upload the XML file to the mentioned tool and then I've got another XML to import into Blogger. There is a very nice Google effort on making it easy to transfer your data in and out their products: The Data Liberation Front. There are however few things that aren't so smooth:

• Blogger has really awkward handling of paragraphs: it encloses them in div, inserting br elements on every hard break. There is an option to turn off the later functionality, but it doesn't get you plain old <p>s anyways; it's pretty annoying, because it caused extra empty lines after my each paragraph and makes the markup very non-semantic. I'm writing the posts in HTML then to have control over it, but the editor is also pretty strange, because it seems to interpret whitespace – I hope that it will be fixed soon.
• The platform doesn't let you define your own 404 pages. It's maybe not a big deal on its own, but because I've set a 302 redirect from my old blog here and URL patterns differ between Blogger and Wordpress, it causes all redirects from the old blog to land on the standard 404 page, so visitor feels a bit lost.
• Great thing about Blogger is that you can host static resources like CSS or Javascript files on Google Sites. The catch here is that Google Sites block the traffic if the original request was performed outside of Google domains (which include blogger.com). So it's easy to host JS files if your blog is in blogger.com namespace, but if you choose to use a custom domain, you need to host the files elsewhere. I don't really think that this restriction will be lifted, because other checks for request coming from actual Blogger blog could be counterfeited; luckily, there are lot of CDNs (I'm using the one from Google) that host the most popular Javascript frameworks and toolkits and for simple scripts and CSS, you are free to modify the head element of the page.

I am Sun Certified Business Component Developer!

I am very happy to announce that I passed Sun Certified Business Component Developer for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (CX-310-091) exam with an astounding score of 100%!

The exam turned out to be easier than I expected (that is somewhat reflected by my score :D). I was also surprised by the fact that there were no drag-and-drop questions — the exam page mentions about them. Maybe the questions are randomized without taking the type into account or I simply did it so automatically that I didn't even noticed.

While preparing to the exam, I answered a fair amount of questions from JavaBlackBelt EJB section and the ones provided as a demo by various exam simulators, and I got the impression that the exam will test my knowledge of both specifications rather thoroughly. I've expected questions regarding e.g. declarative security in conjunction with both inheritance and XML descriptors or some twisted JPQL queries. That wasn't the case. Actually, of 61 questions about six were somewhat tricky and involved really good understanding of the subtleties. There were also 4 or 5 that were IMHO ambiguously formulated, provided additional, unnecessary details in the statements or were so obvious and unclear at the same moment that I sit there ruminating where is the catch. The majority of the questions, which is far than sufficient to pass the exam, were written really good and tested in scenario-based fashion the knowledge that I find absolutely compulsory for the developer to have.

It goes like this: think you know what each transaction attribute does? Show you understand the reason behind their creation, by choosing the most appropriate one for a given real-world scenario. This is what you are doing on the job and also my way of learning. I find it a real leap in the terms of exam quality, comparing to Sun Certified Java Programmer one. I'm not saying I know the way to construct a better exam for this level, but the problems from SCJP seemed very artificial to me. I felt like reading code of a guy that should be sentenced for writing it that way, while being in some sort of captivity myself, because I haven't got even a compiler, not to mention some code editor with syntax highlighting. That's a nightmare, not an exam.

I heard that new SCJP exam (called SCJP+ as far as I remember) is designed as a set of short programming tasks involving writing a real code. This problem-solving approach is in my opinion the best way to build the exams if we want Sun's certification to be highly valued in the market.

My certification is already outdated as the Java EE 6 came out last week :). Put the (probable) two years adoption period aside, there is something to worry about — as depicted on this page, the future SCBCD exam is to be split into EJB and JPA specific ones. While I find this move very rational, I am afraid that it will mean that the certification fee will double. I wish I were wrong.

To sum up, I feel that I've learnt pretty much about Java EE 5 through my preparation for the exam and feel really satisfied, since that was the point of this whole effort. I'm now pretty confident of the platform's strong and weak points. The broader knowledge of the shortcomings make me lean (language joke, yeah) toward Spring 3.0, as Java EE 6 doesn't seem to resolve them. I'll write more as soon as I'll get a good grasp of both.

Preparing for the Sun Certified Business Component Developer Exam

I did not have time to write recently, because I am busy preparing for the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam. I am taking it in a little over two weeks, so this period of my blogging inactivity hopefully won't last long.

I chose the "EJB 3 in Action" as my main textbook and read EJB Core and Persistence specifications thoroughly. The last two are important to me as they operate with the language I expect to encounter at the exam. I find it not so uncommon for big vendors to use their sole own bits of terminology (for example in the web services realm).

I am also using Sun Java EE Tutorial as a refresher and contributing to JavaBlackBelt EJB 3 exams. I also find it convenient to choose NetBeans and Glassfish v2 as my playground to test some boundary cases I conceive. Generally, I am an Eclipse guy and many things in NetBeans (especially its editor) are counter-intuitive to me, but its "Verify" option is very helpful in the preparation. It basically checks whether the EJB project fulfills specification restrictions (in fact, some proper subset of them). Using reference application server saves me from checking every little doubt in the documentation, since I admit to believe in such empirical knowledge gathering. Nevertheless, I've already found some things that should be signaled by an exception, but were graciously unsaid by the server.

All in all, I've enjoyed the preparation to this exam a way better than to the SCJP one so far and hope to say the same after taking it.