Originally posted by Paul van den Berg:
do you think it's a good investment diving into the certification (looing at the future of webservices)?
Web services aren't going away. What do you want the certification for? If its simply an entry on your resume then it probably never has been "worth it". If however you are looking for your own personal milestone of learning about web services as an interfacing technology in the J2EE 1.4 space then it is a good certification especially as it will also include technologies that have relevance outside of J2EE, like XML, XML Schema,
SOAP and WSDL.
The inclusion of UDDI/JAXR was fashionable at the time and seems a bit of dead weight right now. JAX-RPC has been deprecated and replaced by JAX-WS. However preparation for the current SCDJWS will give you a solid foundation in Java web services technology that should easily
extend to the current APIs.
Many have been holding off because of the belief that a Java EE 5/JAX-WS based exam will be easier - mainly because of the shift form XML-based configuration to Java annotations. Apart from some "common sense defaults" most of the complexity has
shifted rather than gone away. For some annotations you may have to add logic in seemingly unconnected areas if your needs don't coincide with the "common sense defaults". And for certification you will need to know what to do in those situations. Annotations also have the unfortunate side-effect of promoting a Java-centric view, which is something that you want to avoid with web services if interoperability with non-Java platforms is a concern (if it isn't should you be using web services?).
Some feel that "simply updating" the exam to Java EE 5/JAX-WS will make it a more desirable certification. I don't think it is as simple as that. Things have changed. In 2003/2004 web services focused on enabling Remote Procedure Call style communication through firewalls and over the internet (which was promptly used to expose SLSBs as web services). However SOAP was also seen a the basis for the next stage in (application-level) distributed processing which could ultimately enable dynamic business process management (BPM).
The landscape has changed. It isn't clear whether Java EE 5 or any of its successors will ever be as relevant as J2EE 1.4 was (often an application server is overkill). Nonetheless JAX-WS and JAXB are also part of Java SE 6. BPM and SOAP, WSDL are still relevant but will probably be much less mainstream than was initially predicted (and hoped). SOAP and WS-* do what they were designed to do - but it turns out that many web service applications didn't need to do what WS-* was designed to do; e.g. most web services talk directly to the client - SOAP was designed to travel over intermediate nodes, possibly over transports other than HTTP. SOAP-based RPC, as desired by the developers, wasn't as interoperable as it needed to be, so document-oriented SOAP has become the standard. Now the vision of the machine-readable web has stepped more into the forefront. SOAP web services are no longer the only game in town. XML over HTTP is used in simple scenarios (which can be done with
servlets) and REST is used more and more for data services and Rich Internet Application support. XML is no longer the only reasonable choice as a data/media format. JSON for example is used in RIA support or for transmitting objects.
So you can only decide based on your needs whether the certification is worth it. I doubt that a future certification will be easier - it may simply be more specialized.
