All,
I gathered in these
thread the success stories
SCEA part I that we all read so far in these Forum.
Following are a list of impressions/suggestions of successful people.
It is really interesting to read in a row all theses comments. You will get the big picture of the topics you really need to study.
Regards,
Herve Attia
==========================================
[Amanda Waite]
The questions were more conceptual than I expected with not a single line of
Java Code in the questions or the exhibits.
About 5 questions on Design
patterns, about 4 questions that included firewalls,
probably 4 UML questions although 1 question presented a Sequence diagram
but talked about the objects involved and not directly about the diagram itself
Only a couple of transactional questions and these focused on accessing legacy systems.
There were also questions on Corba and it's features.
The rest of the questions were EJB-centric.
I didn't get any questions on Active Replication of distributed objects
(see link
http://studsys.mscs.mu.edu/~hli/Dist2000/FinalExam.html) Nor really any questions on JSP/Servlet implementation.
Oh, I did get about 5 questions on JMS or that included JMS as an answer.
[Aaron Robinson]
The
test included a lot of
EJB.
There was a reasonable amount but an easy level of UML � what methods were called by what in the sequence diagrams,
what the relationship between classes and interfaces were in class diagrams.
Patterns were covered as much as UML. There were no questions that asked you to name a pattern
from UML despite the objectives.
There were questions about data access objects and their relationships with EJB.
There were explicit Internationalisation and Security questions as per the objectives.
One question expected you to know the port numbers that various protocols go through
There was an unexpected amount of references to XML despite it not being in the objectives explicitly.
I would say that EJB is by far and away the most covered subject and you need to know it in great detail.
You will need to know the Monson book back to front.
You will need to know the purpose of every pattern in Gamma as well as the consequences of each.
you will need to be familiar with class and sequence diagrams at least.
[Vladan Radovanovic]
The only thing I have to add to his post here is that You read j2ee blueprints
[John Wetherbie]
1) Know EJBs really well (no duh, huh?) to a very detailed level.
Understand how the different components of a bean react to events and perform their functions.
I'd recommend reading all of the Enterprise JavaBeans book (from O'reilly) except
for the first and last chapters and chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 of the EJB 1.1 spec.
2) Know UML diagrams reasonably well. I'd say this means knowing the difference between the generalization and
realization symbols - stuff like that. UML Distilled by Fowler should suffice.
3) Know your patterns! Know all the pattern names, know what they are used for,
and know how parts of J2EE use patterns. The Design Patterns book will give you most of this.
4) Know the details of the protocols mentioned in the objectives. Know what they do,
what they are good/bad for, their mechanics, how they interact with firewalls
5) Know the details of
Applet related security.
[Rahul Mahindrakar]
it is very important to know the ports on which the various protocols work.
The questions do not specify the protocols being used assuming that you know what protocol it is.
For example one can state that given a protocol on port 80 and a firewall can my applet work??
Rearding common firewall features which interfere with protocols one should remember that mostly
the HTTP protocol at port 80 is allowed to pass through the firewall.
Rest all protocols are not allowed unless explictitly granted access.
For example in an intranet similar to what i have access in office
i cannot run an IIOP or an FTP as my office firewall may not allow
it to go through through packet filtering.
I may also not be able to access specific sites like abcde.com .
I hope you get the picture.
Firewalls in scenarios are killers. You have to be careful about them.
Thus in the above question no mention of the Http protocol being used was/is made.
Design Patterns is a very very important area. You have to get all of these right.
They are very simple. One specific question got me stumped as it referred to an Object of the Java API.
Any how Questions in this area are easy.
EJB qeestions are not questinons asking you the API but rather the Concepts.
When would you use stateless, stateful and entity beans. The persistance mechanisms available
in these three and the transactions mechanism's available.
There is no reference of J2EE design Patterns but
you should know which gama pattern fits
into the J2EE framework.
[Vivek Viswanathan]
The exam contained about (as far as I can remember)
2 questions from internationalization,
6 questions from UML - they were really very simple, as compared to what I had expected.
9 question from EJB and EJB Container model.
4 questions from Design Patters - some of the questions were easy, while others were about
the type of design patters used in EJB design. You really have to understand and use
design patters for these kind of questions -
I would suggest reading the 'Gang of 4' book on design patterns.
There were many design questions involving designing of J2EE system under the specified requirements,
some of the questions had about 7 options - it really scared me,
but all that you have to do is take a deep breath and think.
Applet security is important, read the FAQ on applet security from the sun site.
[Brandon Hill]
Jaworski's book is good for legacy connectivity. Know privileges of untrusted classes.
Know clustering overview.
[Madhu Juneja]
The exam is not very easy.
There were 8-10 questions with 6 options. Sometimes difficult to choose from the options.
The following are the details :
EJB 8-10 questions most of them on life cycle,
when to use stateless and stateless session and when to use entity.
For example there were scenario questions that required to store the reference.
This scenario expected the option to be stateful bean.
I did not get any questions on Isolation levels.
There was a question on Transaction attributes.
UML About 4 questions on navigability etc.
Messaging 4 questions. Again concepts.
Remember for some questions the answer itself was JMS
I18n : 2 questions
Security 4 questions
There were various application scenario.
I felt Java Blue prints and also Java 2 Network Security helped to some extent.
There were questions on firewall being between a applet and terminal server.
Remember which protocol on what port.
Already mentioned some posts.
Like the questions just say that the server listens on 443
and it is assumed we know which service listens at port 443.
1 question was on the features of firewall.
EJB and legacy connectivity - 2 - 3 questions.
Design patterns 3 questions. Reading the definitions from GOF should do.
[Adithya Rayaprolu]
Study design strategies for EJBs. Many of questions consisted of designing EJBs to improve performance and scalability.
The design strategies chapters in Blueprints and EJB by Monson will be useful.
some questions in which 'code refactoring' is one of the answer choices.
There were 4-5 questions on scalability and maintainability
Applet security faq on sun's site should be useful. There were 2 questions on this.
Need to know what is B2B application, I don't know whether my answer was correct or not.
Need to know about load balancing, clustering.
If you can get information about how load balancer works, that would be useful.
