Howdy, you ask a very important question!
But you don't have to worry-- it will be a looooooong time before we update the SCBCD for J2EE 1.4. We won't do it until a significant chunk of the market has migrated/updated their servers and applications to 1.4, and that's going to be a while. There is current no plan to update the exam until sometime *after* the end of 2004. That means you probably won't see a new exam until about one year from now (by the time an exam goes through development and beta and into final release). In fact, there's a possibility that we'll simply wait for EJB 3.0 before updating the exam (and then update it early in the 3.0 release cycle) because EJB 3.0 will offer BIG and important changes to the spec.
Our policy for enterprise exams is usually to wait until there is a critical mass out there... so that you are being certified on "what people are using" rather than "the latest and greatest but that nobody is using." Although if a specification undergoes a profound change, we would speed up the release. But that's not the case now: an EJB 2.1 exam won't really look different from EJB 2.0.
We decided to go forward with updating the SCWCD update, though, because we believe people are updating their web containers and web apps more rapidly than their enterprise bean containers and apps, and because J2EE 1.4 made significant and important changes to the specs related to
Servlets and JSPs, but did *not* make significant changes to the EJB spec.
And... we're introducing the Web Services exam which *will* include the relevant parts of J2EE 1.4, including the web services-specific additions to the EJB spec.
So, you don't have to wait
cheers,
Kathy
