Going thru the requirements

I have some problems getting myself up to speed on this assignment. I can blame lots of things like work load, my wife and children needing atention, but in the end I can only just blame myself. It seems to be hard just starting on it.
But allright finally I started really reading the requirements specs a couple of times.
Going thru them I wrote down the things that seemed unclear.

Then going over the scenario's given, I started out in writing down the entities I discovered in there, these are possible classes and/or attributes.

Now I am working on the creation of the sequence diagrams based on the scenraio's this will also result in class diagrams.

Well I just must make sure that I keep this up and continue...

Using stereotypes to describe J2EE components

For the SCEA assignment the architecture needs to be documented using UML.
Most architectures will have J2EE components like EJB's or servlets.
When these are documented you can opt to fully document each EJB, meaning adding all interfaces as separate elements on a class diagram, and incorporating the complete message flow in sequence diagrams containing all standard EJB message calls, like ejbCreate, etc.
I think that documenting the design and architecture in such a way will clutter the diagrams too much, thereby making the design/architecture harder to read.

Simplifying the diagrams by adding stereotypes to these elements, like <ejb> makes reading the the design/architecture easier and keeps the focus on the essential parts.

Sun has documented some annotations they use in their pattern catalog.

In addition to these stereotypes I will add Stateless/Stateful to designate the different session beans when needed, and maybe come up with some additional stereotypes when necessary.

Netbeans 6.0 Keyboard shortcuts

I am trying to switch from eclipse to Netbeans when doing some Java coding.
The biggest problem that came up is the keyboard shortcuts, obviously they all differ, so I miss the ones I learned to love and use a lot in eclipse, like pressing Ctrl-1, in eclipse this opens an assistant that helps you resolve compilation problems.

I found a link that at least shows some of the shortcuts, and one that describes where to find a keyboard shortcut list in the netbeans installation. The shortcuts.pdf file also contains a link to a wiki page that describes the keyboard shortcuts specification.

From the wiki page I learned that the shortcut I so desperately need is Alt + Enter, as explained in the 'Coding in Java' section under 'Show suggestion/Tip/Hint'.

SCEA Part I

On December 14th I passed for the first part of the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam (SCEA), with a score of 93%.
Immediately after this multiple choice exam I registered for its follow-up: the assignment.
The assignment consists of some requirements, a business domain model and use cases for a flight booking system for the airliner Fly By Night. Due to the non diclosure agreement I have signed when registering for the assignment, I cannot write about the assignment and my solution in much detail, but I will try to keep a record of my doings here on the blog from now on.