A mock question

[Stanley Lee]

A website offers customers price comparisions on a variety of products. Revenue is generated when customer find the best price and click through the sales.

Question is: What technologies will you use?

A. JSP/Servlets
B. JSP/Servlets/EJB

Answer is A.

It is unclear to me: If products information stored in server database, then why not EJB?

Thanks for the help.

[Ajith Kallambella]

It is unclear from your question whether transactional support is required. Chances are, if you are only reading data but not writing/updating, transactional support may not be necessary. And therefore one can make a case for not using EJBs.

This is one of those broad questions. There is enough vagueness in there for me to disqualify the question it self. And the use/non-use of EJB is another issue that can be contested even when you have transactional requirements, so any given answer can be both proven right and wrong. Rest assured, you will not get such ambiguous questions in the actual test.

HTH

[jono]

Stanley,

that looks like one of those ambiguous whizlabs questions! I found whizlabs very good for improving my score and focussing in on the right areas but I felt some of the questions were very ambiguous and some were actually wrong. However, for the record - these are the reasons for using EJBs that I adhere to:
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EJBs should be used when you need either security or transaction support. Outside of this you need to question why you are using EJBs.
EJB Provides
- Transaction Management
- State Management
- Resouce Pooling
- Security Checks
- Number of pooled instances specified at deployment time.

Specifally in relation to the mock question you posed - I agree with the Sheriff. It depends on what is going on t the backend as to whether security or transactionality is required. The question does not give enough detail to decide this and thus you cannot determine whether you shoudl use EJB or not. Furthermore, even if security and transactionality is not an issue, J2EE best practices sugest that in a complex system, employing an MVC archiecture and maintaining business services in EJBs exposed through Business Services Facades is stilla good idea. etc.. etc.. the more I think abtou it, the less useful this question gets!

hope this helps

[buyao fanwo]

I guess the the keyword is click in "Revenue is generated .... best price and click ..." although it doesn't make much sense to me.

[Robert Paris]

It's because the question is not stated well. It should have been stated as:

You have a website similar to mysimon.com where you do not sell any products but simply grab price information on different products from different online vendors for customers to compare. You generate revenue when a user clicks through to an online vendor's product. The information is sent to your site in real-time via web services from each vendor.

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I know the book you're using, it's crap and very poorly edited.