John Mercier

Recently, there have been a few good pointers posted at javaranch on what to expect on the exam here and here.

"Don't expect the exam center to be quiet. (going last on the day might help. I was the first one for the day and lot of people were coming in and going out in the middle of my exam.)"

I may have to call the exam center and ask about this. If it is busy in the morning it may be a good idea to take it later in the day.

"I wasn't able to review drag and drop question. The software was giving a warning that if I try to review the question then I'll have to re answer them which was really frustrating."

This is a huge deal, and I've seen a lot of complants about this on the forum. This should be fixed asap!

"Inner classes with most weirdest combination appears every where. You need to know the in and out of inner classes."

This is where I may have trouble... inner classes that extend inner classes anybody?

"Don't skip the tough questions thinking you can revisit them later because some of the questions appear easy, but it may not be that easy once you start thinking deeply!"

I think you could probably skip questions, but if you are skipping every other question maybe you should relax and just answer them. You can always mark the questions to look at later but at least put your best guess.

Ok everyone, I finished making my CircularString class. For now, it does not use generics because I only need it for integers. That will be changed if I find a need for it. I have also made a CircularStringShift class that, instead of using a fillIndex, shifts the contents of the buffer and adds to the end. I tested both with 100,000,000 characters, and they are about the same speed. Here is the code.[Read More]

Have you every made your own InputStream such as a text formatter or a url extractor. In my case, I made an InputStream that can extract urls from any other InputStream and send those urls to an interface called LinkEater. What I want to talk about in this post is how I tested my LinkParserInputStream.

Everyone that claims to know java should know how InputStreams are designed. They use composition to modify the behavior or other InputStreams. InputStreams are a classic example of the Decorator pattern. I took advantage of this pattern when I made my LinkParserInputStream. It obviously HAS-A InputStream and when it is read from it looks for urls in its composit partner. Just what kind of InputStream can it contain? Well any, but what if you want to test it.

To test my LinkParserInputStream I made a class that can read from a string and return characters like an InputStream. By combining a StringReader with the InputStream interface I was able to do this very simply. I believe this pattern is called the Adapter pattern. Here is how the class turned out...[Read More]

Here is a power point I made about Circular Strings. It is my own variant of a Circular Buffer.

This is a program that will basically spellcheck a single webpage. This is a research project that will help me learn the Java Application Framework, HTTPClient, downloading, parsing, and spellchecking. The things that I learn here will help me in another project I am working on.[Read More]

moaxcp is an old web site I created at johnmercier.net. I started working on this project in 2003 while I attending PTI. The web site is actually built on top of another project I made for blogging called blogson. Blogson has many blogging features but is not very good for everything a website might need. moaxcp was a presentation of every project I had made at that time.

Technology used: jsp, jdbc
Design Pattern: Model 1

The view is not seperated from the model or control at all. In fact, all three of them are combined. Each module of the program is in its own jsp file so the index.jsp only has to include the header, footer, left, center, and right jsp files. The index.jsp file also includes a connection.jsp file which connects to the database and creates a Statement object for all the modules to use. Each jsp file can include other jsp pages. This allows for a seperation of code but does not seperate the scope used for each jsp. This is slightly different from the traditional Model 1 approach but once the jsp is precompiled it all gets turned into one jsp page for the program.

Interesting featers:

• The ant build script creates a build.properties file containing an auto-incrementing build number and date. This file is read by the jsp page to display the information.
• The ant build script actually deployed the entire site, through ftp, to the host server.
• The ant build script zipped all projects into a zip file for the Download section of the site.
• The ant build script created md5 checksums for each download in the Download section.

Again this project was only meant to combine all of my projects in a webpage.

I've run into a few issues with the blogging software I'm using for this site. Here they are:

• site model is not availiable by default
• comments cannot be switched on
• Tag cloud displays tags from draft posts
• bookmarks are deleted when moved
• themes cannot be completely created from roller

Honestly, I'm glad that roller has become an official apache project, but it has a few problems. I'm a big believer that once a program is installed I should not need go into the installation directory and edit text files just to set something up. I have a feeling that the first two problems are probably configuration issues, but I've been through the entire site and the two manuals and I have not found a thing that helps. Roller just seems like it is made for big blogger communities where administrators have time to figure these things out. For a one person blog though it is not too good. It would be interesting to work on these problems and fix them in the spirit of open source software, but I'm not sure I have the time to do that. The second and third issues would be easy but the last would be much harder. I will continue to look into these problems and see if I can submit a bug report.