Originally posted by Alexandre Folgueras:
Hi, I'd just like to have your comments on this. How hard do think is the ejb certification in comparasion to the scjp and the scwcd? Personnaly, I thought scjp was not very difficult, I scored 88% on it a year ago. I recently took the scwcd exam and studied a whole lot more than for the scjp certification and got 76%. I thought it was very difficult mainly because of all the concepts to remember. Do we need to learn a lot of things by heart for the SCBCD?
P.S. If any one of you guys also did or is currently studying for the web services certification, please tell me your thoughts on this too.
Thanks!
I did the SCJP back in 2000, it was easier back then, but I needed it for a job. Even now it's still just a basic language exam. Nothing special.
I did the SCWCD exam in early '04. It took 2 months part-time and one exam simulator and I scored 96%. It's a very straightforward exam, no real gotchas.
I'm doing the SCBCD exam this April. I think the SCBCD exam is TWICE as difficult as the SCWCD exam.
Here's why:
1. It's at least twice the size. Take a look at the specs for both (
http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/docs.html) and see what you think.
2. Conceptually, EJB 2.0 is tougher to understand.
Servlets and JSPs are very conventional and easy to follow. No container callbacks and the lifecycle of a servlet (or even a
JSP page) is elementary. Not so with EJB. You have three major bean types and they all have different lifecycles you have to memorize.
3. With EJB you have to worry about remote vs. local clients. The differences are minor except when you consider the containers behavior with regard to exceptions and pass by reference-copy for remote.
4. Transactions is the next tough part of EJB. You have 6 transaction attributes, all behave quite differently from each other.
5. Let's not forget that monstrosity known as the ejb-jar.xml Deployment Descriptor that EJB ends up requiring you to write. If you thought there were a lot of tags in SCWCD, wait to you see the nightmare that the Deployment Descriptor is in EJB 2.0. Totally ridiculous.
6. Throw on top of all that the twisted implementation Entity Beans are in respect to BMP and CMP. One has you write a concrete bean class and returning the Primary Key type from ejbCreate<..> method. The other has you write an abstract class and you return the Component interface type, but with a null value. Who designed this crap, a first year Comp Sci student?
And if that wasn't enough, the latest EJB 3.0 spec is a complete re-write of the way everything is done! There will be backwards compatibility of course, but I suspect there are thousands of engineers waiting for the easier to follow EJB 3.0 and basically ditching the whole 2.0 exam.
If I hate it so much, why am I still doing the exam? (In order)
1. Because most of you will not take the exam once you see what's involved. It's a competition-based society we work in.
2. It will be around for at least two more years. EJB 3.0 requires jdk1.5, and that won't be adopted by companies until around '06 at the earliest.
3. For a contractor, most money is to be made in maintaining old poorly written applications, not in jumping on the latest bandwagon (like Web Services) that every young engineer thinks he/she needs to get on. Web Services are definitely important, and I will do that exam eventually, but not until there is an exam simulator for it. It's stupid to do an exam too early and make it extra hard on yourself.
Yes, the SCBCD exam is way tougher than the SCWCD exam.
-jeff walker
