2007-12-27
A $100 auction for new year is waiting for you in the auction room.
Happy new year and thank you so much for your terrific contributions!
2007-11-29
Morten Lauritsen Khodabocus, a blue belt from Switzerland created XML W3C Schema exam.
New exam includes 20 questions concerning the XML Schema issues. Now we need your contribution in order to traverse the exam into the beta state.
2007-11-12
Arpan Rajani and Bharat Sunil Varma, brown and blue belts from India released Servlet - Intermed exam.
New exam includes 16 questions concerning various Servlets-related issues such as request filters, cookies or session life cycle.
2007-11-04
Thomas Schroeder, from Australia released Java 5 New Tools and Tool Features exam.
To pass the new exam you have to answer 8 from the 10 questions concerning new Java 5 (alias Tiger) tools enhances.
2007-10-28
Amzad Basha and Bharat Sunil Varma, brown and blue belts from India released JSP - Intermed exam.
New exam includes 20 questions concerning JSP.
We want to say 'thank you' to Amzad and Bharat due to their moderation effort.
2007-10-21
Join John Rizzo, the founder of JavaBlackBelt as he explains the internals of the JavaBlackBelt.com platform, including the strategic technical choices made and their evolutions from inception to v3 and the main technical problems faced in making these choices.
For further info & registration click here
2007-10-10
I would not dare to pretend that we are finished up creating technology exams that pertains to Java developers. There are so many Java related technologies, that we could triple our list … but we’ve filled much of the gap.
Now that work is done, I see a demand for higher level exams:
But I’ve to admit that I just don’t see how to do that on JavaBlackBelt now.
Architecture
What would you ask about architecture? You’d probably have to torture me before making a JavaBlackBelt exam advocating the use of J2EE/EJB (v2).
Would you ask to enumerate/recognize the patterns proposed by Martin Fowler in its book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture? I’m not sure Martin would love the idea.
Methodology
What would you ask about methodology? Enumerate the official values of eXtreme Programming? Recognize that Scrum is heaven and waterfall is hell?
The problem with methodology and architecture is that ... it depends on the context. What works for a team/project would not be suitable for another. It is rarely black or white.
Do you imagine a multiple choice question describing a team and project, then asking to select the best option for that situation? Any question of that kind that I’ve seen is poor, is not scientific, is debatable.
I understand that declaring a person is a good architect or project manager, must be done by a human. But, I feel that we can (and don’t know how) help solving part of this evaluation on JavaBlackBelt, a scalable way.
I was discussing the matter at JAOO with Michael Feathers. A was a little bit drunk (it was just after my interview with Juggy...) but I can remember his clever suggestion: what about asking community members to (manually through mails and interview) assess other community members on-line.
It is certainly a way to explore, a little bit as LinkedIn where you recommend somebody because you know him/her.
It someway hits my initial idea of having brown belts needing to find black belts to promote them to black.
We have much to think before we get a nice solution.
What do you think ?
2007-10-04
Hilbert Schraal, a green belt from The Netherlands, has written a JavaBlackBelt plugin for Confluence.
Today, I released a plugin for Confluence that shows the status of one or more users of JavaBlackBelt.
Confluence is an enterprise WIKI that is highly extensible by using plugins. To get an idea of how these plugins are built, I made one myself. I happened to be playing around with JavaBlackBelt, so I decided to use that as an example. The goal was to have my JavaBlackBelt status (in the form of an image of a (karate/judo) belt) displayed dynamically in Confluence.
After some browsing through examples I found out that all I had to do was implement the Macro interface. Implementing the hasBody(), getBodyRenderMode() and isInline() methods was a piece of cake. The harder work was with the execute() method. What this method does is generate the HTML that shows what you want to show using the macro. Luckily the guys from JavaBlackBelt already built a javascript library that I could use. Therefore, most of the work was in parsing the parameters of the macro and having a decent error handling mechanism in place. The resulting code shows this.
2007-09-22
I’m preparing a presentation “ Inside JavaBlackBelt” explaining the internals of the platform.
I’ll give this presentation for the first time at the JAOO conference next week in Denmark.
October 29th, our partner SkillsMatter organizes a free session of the same presentation in London.
Should you come to any of these sessions; please let me know in advance so I can take a few extra gifts with me (my mail address is my first name at JavaBlackBelt.com).
I plan to publish a few articles extending the presentation, this year and maybe a video of one of the sessions.
John.
2007-09-13
Amzad Basha (a brown belt from India) together with Piotr Kowalski (also brown belt, from Poland) released JSF 1.1 - Basic exam.
New exam includes 24 questions concerning JSF web framework version 1.1.
Special thanks go to Piotr not only due to his moderation effort but also because he is the most prominent contributor for this exam.
2007-08-31
'Algorithms - Basic' exam coordinated by John Rizzo is finally mature enough to change its status to beta.
New exam includes more than 20 questions concerning fundamental algorithmic topics such as basic data structures, sorting, trees or recursion. Special thanks go to Alejandro Tkachuk, the most active contributor of this exam.
2007-08-24
As you know we go to Denmark September 23-28 to JAOO.
You also know that you get 15% discount.
Now you know that you have one possibility to go for free :-)
2007-08-20
Amzad Basha, a brown belt from India released Struts 1 - Intermed exam.
New exam includes 15 questions concerning Apache Struts MVC framework.
Please everybody say 'thank you' to Amzad not only due to his moderation effort but also because he is the most prominent contributor for this exam.
2007-08-15
September 23-28, I go to Denmark again at the JAOO conference doing 2 things I enjoy:
Obviously, I won't miss the great JAOO technical sessions ... which are not all so technical. I must admit I like the methodology sessions also ;-)
As I write this news, I think it could be interesting to run an on-line competition with a free JAOO pass (3.202EUR), or to put it in the auction room... I'll come back with another news if we do that.
And if you plan to go to JAOO this year, JavaBlackBelt can get you 15% off.
Just drop me a mail at javablackbelt dot admin at sign gmail then dot com.
John Rizzo.
2007-08-10
Brown belt and moderator Chinh Nguyen published objectives for a Swing LayoutManager exam.
That's the first non-basic Swing exam (apart of the JGoodies exams).
Volunteers are welcome to write objectives for the next possible Swing exams: Table, Tree, EDT (EventDispatcher / Threading,...), Input (mouse, keyboard, focus,...), Graphs.
The Swing LayoutManager exam is waiting for your questions...
2007-07-28
Evgeniy Platonov has set the (GoF) Design Patterns exam "Beta".
You've been damn fast contributing on this one!
2007-07-19
Henryk Konsek (him again...) published objectives for a Velocity - Basic exam.
... and I've put some bonus factor on it for your contribution points.
2007-07-15
Nicolas and John visited a corporate customer from Belgium this week: USG Innotiv.
This consultancy company started using JavaBlackBelt Corporate edition 3 months ago. This week they invited their developers having at least a yellow belt, to a little party. They were 12, including 4 brown belts (yes, already 4 brown belts in 3 months).
We got a lot of interesting feedback in this party, and one bottle of champaign offered by the company for each succeeded brown belt.
Congratulations to these 4 guys (who will remain anonymous in this news, for protecting the privacy of this customer).
On the picture, from left to right: John Rizzo from JavaBlackBelt, brown1, brown2, brown3, brown4, Nicolas Brasseur from JavaBlackBelt.
2007-07-08
Mwanji, from our team, has been invited by TheServerSide team to their Java Symposium at Barcelona.
The ServerSide Java Symposium 2007 in Barcelona got off to an excellent start with Martin Fowler and Neal Ford's keynote on "Language-Oriented Programming and Language Workbenches." Some of the central elements of the talk were Domain Specific Languages, closures and the Fluent Interface idea. Used together, these can lead to more human-readable code and a more sophisticated modelling system than the tree hierarchies we're used to, especially in dynamically typed languages like Ruby. You can read more about it on Fowler's website.
Our stand was between Sun's and Google's, impressive company to say the least! The first Challenge we ran was a Java 5 test, but a lot of people told me they hadn't worked in Java 5, so on the following days, we switched to a Java 1.4 Challenge. This trend was confirmed during Eugene Ciurana's talk on "Architecting For The Future." He asked who was using Java 6 in production. I think two out of over 100 people raised their hands. A lot of people weren't even in Java 5 yet. A couple of very ashamed developers admitted to still working with Java 1.3.
Several prize draws were held in the Main Ballroom, and a funny tradition was created: every single time, the first person drawn at random wasn't in the room, someone else had to be drawn. I could only imagine how their facial expression changed when someone informed them: "Hey, you won a PlayStation 3! But then you lost it!"
Thanks to Mark, Kelli, Nitin, Katie and Ashley at TechTarget/TSS for putting on a really informative and enjoyable conference! Thanks to everyone who took the challenge and got interested by the JBB concept and technology. We handed out a lot of t-shirts, so if you see us at a conference, don't hesitate to step up!
Mwanji Ezana.
The first picture on the left is Mwanji Ezana, from JavaBlackBelt.
The second picture is Mateusz Kwasniewski, who won a free pass to the conference on JavaBlackBelt on-line competition, a few weeks ago.
2007-07-03
Patricia and Aymeric are back from the Jazoon conference (Zurich) where they talked to many of you. Thank you for having made JavaBlackBelt a nice success there.
The first picture on the left, are concentrated participants taking the Challenge.
The second picture is Neal Gafter taking the test.
The bottom picture shows some winners. From let to right: Felipe Gaucho, Julio Faerman, Perica Milosevic, Nikola Postolov.
2007-06-25
Piotr Kowalski, from Poland, and
Amzad Basha, from India,
released both Java SE NIO exam.
You'll be asked 14 questions about buffers, channels and selectors. You need 80% to succeed (-> you cannot miss more than 3 questions).
Good luck!
2007-06-17
Evgeniy Platonov, from Ukraine released both Java SE Concurrency - High-Level and Low-Level exams.
These exams feature the concurrency API new to Java 5.
Take them, show your mastery of multi-thread programming, and get more points for your belt.
2007-06-01
As you know, JavaBlackBelt will be at the 1st annual Jazoon conference held in Zurich, June 24-28.
Wednesday, June 6th, at 16:00 (Zurich time, 14:00 GMT), we run the conference on-line competition.
Any JavaBlackBelt user (site registration is free) can register to that competition (competition is free).
1st prize: 1245€ worth conference pass.
2nd prize: 50% off the conference pass.
3rd - 10th prize: 33% off the conference pass.
Travel costs (plane, hotel) will not be reimbursed by JavaBlackBelt or Jazoon.
Good luck !
2007-05-28
If anyone is interested in moderatoring an exam on one of the following topics, please let Jeanne know or post on JavaLobby.
Topics: Hibernate, JGoodies, Eclipse RCP, Java IO/NIO, EJB Intermediate, UML
2007-05-24
JavaBlackBelt will be at the 1st annual Jazoon conference held in Zurich, June 24-28.
We've been invited to run our new competition, The Java Race. (More details will be posted soon...)
We'll also offer our popular JavaBlackBelt Challenge.
If you're there be sure to stop by our booth, we'd be pleased to meet you!
2007-05-05
Why don't exams have moderators?
We rotated the exams people moderate. If you are a moderator and no longer have access to your exam, please post in the Exam selection thread. If you would like to become a moderator for an exam that is missing one, please e-mail Jeanne.
2007-04-24
It starts 27 April, 20:00 GMT
Registration is now OPEN...
Don't forget: if you sign up but don't show up, you'll lose your points.
2007-04-23
The development of JavaBlackBelt v3 will start shortly!
Get involved in the refactoring process: give us your comments and suggestions on the forum thread.
2007-04-14
We are discussing OO exams, including GoF design pattern and OO design principle exams.
Tell us what you think in the forum!
2007-03-29
The JavaBlackBelt platform was chosen as the top innovation in the "Management, marketing and strategy" (for an SMC) category.
Each winner received a trophy awarded during the Entreprendre Trade Fair, by Mr Benoît Cerexhe, a Minister of the Government of the Brussels Capital Region and by professor Kenneth P. Morse, Senior Lecturer and Managing Director at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (USA).
Winners were selected based on certain criteria:
- true innovative nature and proven originality,
- financial performance evaluated in terms of profits generated and/or savings gained, put into perspective with the development and implementation costs of the innovation,
- interest and pertinence, namely the amount of added value generated or potential added value both for the company and for Society in general,
- transferability to other sectors, their inspirational nature and their ability to train other companies in similar approaches.
More about BIA here...
2007-03-23
To celebrate the clocks springing forward for daylight savings (EU&UK) this weekend,***
brown belt Henryk Konsek has created a Spring DAO JDBC exam.
We need your questions! Here's your chance to rake in some contribution points.
Check out the exam objectives...
(*** => a little joke to remind you to turn your clocks ahead.)
2007-02-23
 Tom Copeland kindly reviewed the objectives of the PMD exam. (And, he wrote about our community and the exam on his blog!) The PMD exam, still in Beta, will move to the exam zone much faster with the help of your contributions.
A committer of PMD, Tom is the lead developer of PMD core and a programmer for InfoEther, LLC. He started programming on a TRS-80 Model III, but demand for that skill has waned. Tom now works mostly in Java and Ruby. He's the sysadmin for rubyforge.org and a contributor to various open source projects. He's the author of "PMD Applied", has a book on "JavaCC" in the pipeline, and blogs sporadically (he's the father of six children.)
2007-02-07
Sometimes we notice a user who blazes through the belt track. Dominik Klimczak happens to be one of them. Dominik got his brown belt in less than one month.
Read the interview...
2007-01-24
Give some of them away!
It's E-Z to do:
- Go into your profile
- Click "Manage..."
- Click "list contributions"
- There, below your profile description, you'll see the panel to give points.
WHY give points (aside from being a nice person)?
- Help a fellow JavaBlackBelt user's eligibility for an exam/new belt
- Team up with someone for an auction
2007-01-20
Green Belt Graeme Dunlop, released the Regular Expressions exam, which gives you 2 knowledge points.
2007-01-12
Brown Belt Sergey Trasko, created the Java NIO exam, which was given the green light by Java architect, consultant and author of Java NIO (O'Reilly), Ron Hitchens. The exam will go into Beta very soon.
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2007-11-29
Our friends and business partners from Cap Gemini and USG Innotiv ICT kindly proposed to welcome us on their respective booths for running the JavaBlackBelt contest @ JavaPolis 2007.
Our partnership was officially announced in the last JavaPolis newsletter.
 
T-Shirts & other goodies will be given to Green-Blue-Brown-BlackBelt members ...
2007-11-15
Join John Rizzo, the founder of JavaBlackBelt as he explains the internals of the JavaBlackBelt.com platform, including the strategic technical choices made and their evolutions from inception to v3 and the main technical problems faced in making these choices.
For further info & registration click here
2007-11-08
Our UML exam, lead by Amzad Basha and Piotr Kowalski, is stable now.
You have got almost 25 minutes to answer 16 questions related to the fundamentals of the Unified Modeling Language.
2007-11-01
Morten Lauritsen Khodabocus, a blue belt from Switzerland released XML DTD exam.
New exam includes 15 questions concerning the XML DTD issues.
2007-10-22
John Rizzo JavaBlackBelt founder will explain the strategic technical choices made and their evolution, from inception to v3 and the main technical problems faced.
This presentation is very specific about product experience and problems/solutions. It contains deep technical insights and aspects of architecture and project life/management. You will be able to apply their experience in your current or future Java project.
For further info & registration: Click here ...
2007-10-16
Javablackbelt was at J-Fall in the Netherlands this October 11th '07.
Several contenders participated to the JBB Challenge, with exciting prices for the winners.
A prototype of our upcoming V.3 was very well received by our community members.
We thank our Dutch partner Finalist for coordinating this successful NL-JUG event.
2007-09-30
I've hit JAOO in Denmark, last week.
We’ve run the JavaBlackBelt Challenge. Participants sit down, click, and get 5 random questions that they answer as fast as possible. In fact, this challenge runs alone now... as more and more people know it. This gave me more time for attending the sessions, and I’ve been quite happy with what I heard.
JAOO is one of my favorite conferences because it does not focus on technology only. It focuses on developers, on people, on teams.
One of the main messages I’ve heard from big guys like Martin Fowler, Erik Meijer (Microsoft :-) and Robert Martin is: focus on simplicity and quality.
Focus on simplicity: don’t over-architect. Silver bullets usually fail. Do the simplest (elegant) thing that works. It doesn’t matter if you’ve to change it later when more needs come (in a further iteration).
Focus on quality: look at and think about your code twice. Use test driven development or other activity if it can help you to focus on that. Are your proud of it? If your are proud of it because it’s a complex thing that only a genius (you) can understand, then throw it away.
Robert Martin gave a wise definition of "good" code: the code reads such a way that every line of code is what you expected to be.
Really, clever guys are the ones who make it simple!
John Rizzo.
Picture: Christian Gasser (right), our Danish JavaBlackBelt member having won a free pass to the conference through the auction system, with me (left).
See the web Album.
2007-09-18
JavaBlackBelt V3 is available for preview on our test server.
The V3 includes new features such as ...
- New Design (xhtml compliant)
- Ajax features (Question pre-loading in exams, instant question rating and comments,...)
- Improved usability
- ...
Some functionalities are still under development and the design revamp as not been done on every page yet.
But we'd appreciate feed backs on completed features such as the home page, the exam pages, the forms in general, the whole functional behavior (we did a tremendous back-end refactoring) and mainly the AJAXED questionnaires.
I would really like to have a feedback from Safari (We did test on Safari, but just on windows) and Opera users.
Please report any stuffs related to this preview at aymeric [a.t> javablackbelt / dot / com (not on JIRA please)
The final version is coming soon...
2007-09-05
We've created a page to gather testimonials from the Community about JavaBlackBelt.
It's rudimentary for the moment, but it's a start.
You may send your testimonial to javablackbelt dot admin at sign gmail then dot com and we'll bring them to the page.
Moderators can edit the page and add their words directly.
2007-08-28
New 'Spring - Velocity integration' exam has been released by brown belt Henryk Konsek (from Poland).
New exam includes questions connected with the topic of Spring integration with the Velocity template engine as an alternative view layer for the Spring MVC technology. Now exam needs to be filled with the questions - we will appreciate your valuable contribution.
2007-08-23
We've participated to a few conferences now (usually invited, thank to all these conferences organizers!): JavaPolis 2004, TheServerSide 2005, JAOO 2006, J-Fall 2006, JavaPolis 2006, Q-Con 2007, Sun Tech Days 2007, J-Spring 2007, Jazoon 2007, TheServerSide 2007.
If you organize a conference and would like JavaBlackBelt to join, drop us a mail.
2007-08-18
Thomas Schroeder, from Australia released Java 5 New Base Library Features exam.
New exam includes 20 questions concerning such Tiger's issues as JMX, enhanced concurrency utilities, new security features and many others.
2007-08-12
Java SE Core - Intermed - Programming exam has been created. This exam is required to get a black belt. Once the exam will be released, the black belt will be available (yes, we plan to unlock the black belt in near future).
This Java SE exam is no multiple choice test. You didn't think about becoming a black belt without programming, did you ?
Your valuable contribution is welcome - we need to fill the exam with quality tasks.
2007-07-23
Amzad Basha from India reached 8.000 contribution points last month!
When we created JavaBlackBelt, we couldn't even imagine that people would get much more than 1.000. You are incredible.
We asked Amzad, who is one of our administrators now, a little text about his path:
How much time does it took to bag 8000+ contribution points?
Well, I joined JBB community in June 2006. The toppers that time were with 1000+ (Jeanne) only. I just thought of to cross that number and becoming top 1 contributor, and I could succeed it in Dec 2006 or Jan 2007 (Couldn't remember exactly. :)). It is really happy that still I am on top 3 list. I am very thankful to John Rizzo, founder of JavaBlackBelt, for providing such a beautiful platform, and also my heartful thanks to Jeanne Boyarsky, Administrator, for all her guidance during the initial days at JBB.
Did you expect to accumulate so many points when you started?
To be honest, NO. I just aimed at one of the top 3 contributors. Apart from simply posting the new questions, I was involved in repairing the questions, which were pushed in repair zone. Also, I cleaned up Java SE - Basic and Intermediate exams, so that we are able to have more Yellow beltees in the community, for which John granted me 1000+ points manually and sent JBB logoed jacket as a gift. :)
What you like most/less when contributing?
I like to see more and more code snippets, which are tricky enough, and conceptual based questions, which test the knowledge and exposure on specific areas. As of today I posted 864 questions, there may be some questions extracted based on the text from some reference books / URLs, but I tried my best to fine tune the text and frame it as a valuable question. I suggest the people to post genuinely framed questions, which really worth enough, but not the direct extracts from the references.
What areas you contributed the most?
My major contribution is in Java SE - Basic, Java SE - Intermediate, Java 5 Features, JSP - Basic, JSP - Intermediate, JDBC and also Struts exams.
What is your next goal in JavaBlackBelt?
I would like to bag 10000+ contribution points. Hope I will reach the mark by the end of Oct 2007.
Wow!!! Congrats for the effort!! And Goodluck for your new target!
Thank you very much!
2007-07-16
Welcome to our Admin Team! When you need an admin e-mail javablackbelt.admin AT gmail DOT com and one of us will get back to you.
The team is Ahmed, Arpan, HenryK, Amzad and Jeanne.
2007-07-12
Henryk Konsek published objectives for a Spring Transactions exam.
It's waiting for your questions...
2007-06-30
Our UML exam, lead by Amzad Basha, quickly got many questions.
It's beta now.
Special thanks to the brown belt Henryk Konsek (left picture) and the green belt Andrea Vega (right picture), the most prolific contributors on this exam.
2007-06-19
Wanna develop the JavaBlackBelt platform with us?
Get the privilege to work closely with Aymeric and Nicolas, on a growing world-class project (Belgium - Brussels).
Much agility, technology and visibility guaranteed.
You need some of these skills: Html/CSS, Servlet/JSP/Struts2, Spring2, Hibernate3, Linux/Tomcat/Postgres admin, Ajax,...
But most of all, you'll need to be passionate and smart.
English or French speaking. This is a full-time position.
Don't be shy; just drop a mail to Aymeric and to Nicolas (at JavaBlackBelt dot com).
See full annonce.
2007-06-07
Tuesday, June 12th, at 16:00 (Barcelona time, 14:00 GMT), we run the conference on-line competition.
Any JavaBlackBelt user (site registration is free) can register to that competition (competition is free).
1st prize: 1.895€ worth conference pass.
Travel costs (plane, hotel) will not be reimbursed by JavaBlackBelt or The Server Side.
We'll be happy to see you there and give you some T-Shirts.
Good luck !
2007-06-01
We've reached a milestone in the effort of building and distributing courses through the JavaBlackBelt portal. A huge "Thanks!" to the development team for their committment to achieving this.
The Beta version of the wikiCourse part is now available. (The first courses is under construction.) Basically we tried to apply the same principle as we have done with exams but as a course. that means anybody can propose enhancements to the course content.
In the coming months we'll enhance this platform to integrate features focused on interaction between course attendees and instructors: forum, chat, videoconf, ...
We need your feedback!
The first (available) course can be accessed here: http://www.javablackbelt.com/CourseDisplay.wwa?courseId=3997151
You can try these 2 chapters:
- 2 - First Mapping Example
- 4 - Mapping Types
We would greatly appreciate your comments, from the layout to the content.
You may also contact Nicolas Brasseur, the course creator, directly: {nicolas {at} javablackbelt dot com} or Skype (nicolasbrasseur).
2007-05-26
At the Sun Tech Days in London, (March 2007), we met Java Champion, Heinz Kabutz. We really appreciate his contributions to the Java community, particularly his Java Specialists Newsletter, with over 30,000 subscribers worldwide. It provides relevant, concise information for developers, clarifying various (and sometimes "puzzling") aspects of Java. During Sun Tech Days, we (Trish) got him to take the JavaBlackBelt Challenge. (Sorry if you felt "suckered," Heinz ;-)) He was kind enough to mention us in the latest newsletter.
2007-05-17
John Rizzo (JavaBlackBelt co-founder) will present his unique pedagogies: TechMaps (Flash-animated with voiceovers) to explain various Spring topics. The crew will also be at JSpring to offer the JavaBlackBelt Challenge.
Be sure to stop by and say "Hi!" if you're there:
13 June 2007
Het Spant
Dr Abraham Kuyperlaan 3
1402 Bussum, Netherlands
2007-04-30
Give a try to these two newly released Hibernate 3 exams
Almost free ... for a limited period only.
2007-04-25
Apress, "Books for Professionals by Professionals," has kindly agreed to sponsor our auction prizes. They have an array of titles spanning the many Java technologies you use. Visit Apress.com
2007-04-20
We'll be there with USG Innotiv to meet developers (and offer a little challenge):
25 April 2007
11:00 - 20:00
Tour & Taxis (Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Brussels)
Booth: USG Innotiv
NOTE: if you're registered for the event, parking is free!
2007-04-18
We've been invited to this one-day technology conference to offer the JavaBlackBelt Challenge to attendees.
JavaBlackBelt's founders, John and Nicolas, will give technical talks on Spring as well as Hibernate using their unprecedented pedagogical materials: TechAnims.
IT professionals and specialists hailing from many EU countries will get together at WebTech to share valuable information and ideas.
WebTech Congress 2007 offers a range of lectures, workshops and exhibitions centered on new trends and technological revolutions. During the breaks attendees will have the opportunity to network.
Topics range from Webservices, Ajax Ruby and Flex to Java, .Net and mashup techniques.
WebTech 2007
25 April
De Montil, Affligem
Belgium
Get more info about WebTech...
2007-04-17
It starts 20 April, 17:00 GMT
Registration is now OPEN...
And don't forget: if you sign up but don't show up, you'll lose your points.
2007-04-11
It starts 13 April, 14:00 GMT
Registration is now OPEN...
And don't forget: it you sign up but don't show up, you'll lose your points.
2007-04-01
We really appreciate that some of you mention the community, like exams you passed and belts you earned on your blogs and websites. (We know who you are from our site stats ;-)) Did you know that you could add a "Congratulations" box too? With it you can show your appreciation to fellow users or those in your country. It's super EZ: just a few lines of Javascript. All of the details are HERE...
2007-03-27
 Find out!
Start by training with the XML Core Basic exam...
The competition starts Friday, 30 March, 09:00 GMT.
Registration for the XML Core Basic competition is open, so sign up!
Don't forget to check out the auctions, there's probably a book in there that you may want!
2007-03-20
Last week we went to the UK to offer the JavaBlackBelt Challenge at QCon and Sun Tech Days. We're proud to say that we had over 200 challengers. We kindly thank the organizers for inviting us to be there and for making us feel extra welcome: Mai Skou NIELSEN ( EOS / JAOO), Floyd MARINESCU ( InfoQ) and Michael LONNON of Sun Microsystems UK. A special shout out to Antje KING of Pearson UK for sponsoring our book prizes at both conferences.
Top challengers:
- Jakob Avlund, Lund & Bendsen (DK), was the only challenger to get 5/5
- Roland Nelson of the European Patent Office got 4/5 more than any other challenger. He's responsible for THIS portal among others...
- Signe Kongsgaard Kyster, Lund & Bendsen (DK). One of the few female challengers, came in 1st place once and 2nd place twice
2007-03-05
This exam covers the new features from the java.util.concurrent package in Java 5. Ever wonder what a CountDownLatch is?
Check out the exam!
Thanks to Chris Cooper, a brown belt from the UK and Jimmy Persson, a brown belt from Sweden, for leading our Java SE Concurrency High-Level exam, which gets you 3 knowledge points.
2007-02-22
Why is this important news?
Because that's the topic of the next competition. Registration opens soon...
A great way to prepare for the upcoming competition is to take the exam. (And PLEASE, don't forget to vote on the questions!)
What's more is there's a new auction (opening shortly) for the Java Concurrency book by Brian Goetz.
2007-02-01
We really appreciate that users give us their free time; moderators and admins have been very dedicated to the application.
Recently we asked some of the moderators to take on special missions. In particular, to help us get some outstanding tasks done like moving questions. For example, too difficult questions from the Java SE Basic exam to more appropriate exams.
Over the past few weeks we've seen a significant increase of new yellow belts because of this effort. For this we shout out a huge "Thanks!" to Amzad Basha.
2007-01-22
Our website reached a truly significant milestone: a tally of one million answers (to the multiple choice questions) in the database. We're very proud of this because it shows you are a really (really) active community, sharing your precious time for the JavaBlackBelt exams. In particular, this tally means one million times (that's A LOT of activity) you read through, understood and then answered a question.
And for that, we'd like to thank you for your continued efforts, interest and dedication.
2007-01-18
I met Pietro Polsinelli, one of the TeamWork creators, at JAOO (Danish Java/methodo/.Net) conference, where he demonstrated their brain child. We were very impressed by the detailed user interface of this web application, which looks more like a desktop application.
Since JAOO (September '06), I randomly looked at the TeamWork on-line demos, though I couldn't (then) clearly figure out what to do with the application.
Between Christmas and new year, I had a look at BaseCamp (one of TeamWork's competitors) which is a beautiful application for managing tasks. I immediately saw how we could benefit from it. While it is very easy to use, it's just wasn't powerful enough for our needs.
So, I tried Teamwork again and could realize why (in the heck) it had so many features. I finally realized that TeamWork was exactly what I needed for part of our team.
Our JavaBlackBelt development team uses a bug/request tracker (JavaForge.com).
Our commercial team uses a CRM (SalesForce.com).
And now, the rest of our team (management, back office/admin, PR/media, marketing) uses TeamWork.
We started 10 days ago and we have more than 200 tasks in it. These tasks come from individual to-do lists and now they are in a team repository :-)
Many thanks to Pietro Polsinelli and his team!
Pietro, you must be one darn brilliant Java web developer to have made that! We hope to see you (soon) with a black belt.
John Rizzo
Co-creator of JavaBlackBelt
2007-01-08
We have had much to be pleased about, particularly because of your energetic and inventive dedication for improving JavaBlackBelt over the past year.
This time last year we had a few exams. Soon after we announced the yellow belt. By the end of 2006, we had announced other belts -- up to the brown belt -- and had many more exams to offer.
Because of you, JavaBlackBelt now has 28 exams, 16 more in Beta and 17 under construction. Plus, there are 14000 questions in the DB -- that's 8000 more in only one year.
In 2007, around March, we will roll out the long-awaited black belt exam; other certifications will follow.
An extra special "Thank you!" to our most dedicated volunteer technical administrator, Jeanne "Brown Belt" Boyarsky, who helped our moderators in myriad ways.
We also thank the Top 10 contributors (per points) ever:
1. Amzad Basha, 3767 points
2. Jeanne Boyarsky, 3377 points
3. Guillermo Schwarz, 2553 points
4. Mohammed Yousuff, 2048 points
5. Pravin Jain, 1992 points
6. Alwin Ibba, 1388 points
7. Ankur Gupta, 1169 points
8. Nicolas Duran, 855 points
9. Thomas Schroeder, 826 points
10. Sunil Parmar, 815 points
And 11. Chris Cooper, 743 points, who gave his support whenever we asked for it.
Y'know what else? There's more fun stuff to bid on THIS WEEK with 10 new auctions -- 3 with Think Geek gift certificates!
Stay tuned for more news about what's coming up in 2007.
~ The JavaBlackBelt Team
2007-01-03
London-based Skills Matter partners with JavaBlackBelt. The partnership delivers a unique blended-learning solution to UK software architects and developers across the UK.
Read the press release ...
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All that is needed is YOU -- to take the beta exams and rate the questions. (It's free!) 
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Manning Publications Co., the publisher that brings you the "In Action" books, has kindly agreed to sponsor our auction prizes with titles like 
