Hi,
Just to share my experiences today: I failed the
scea with 6% below the pass score. I was anticipating this, as my preparation time was about two weeks, and I have little experience with
J2EE business components...next time better.
I thought the questions were generally reasonable, and comparable to the findings in other posts. I got relatively many questions on JCA and EIS (which was a bad thing, as I was not prepared for this), and also load balancing and clustering questions (dito). The two hours were just enough for me, so a double check was out of the question.
I have prepared with the certification guides from Cade & Roberts old version, but bought the safari preprint after reading to these posts. In general Cade & Roberts were good, but they lack the J2EE
patterns, security threats, encryption,
JSF and Web Services. These were all asked extensively. Most of the required info I got from reading these posts and downloading/reading the recommended literature and blogs.
I also bought two practice exams from Sun, which were good preparations. I also have an old certification guide from Allen & Bambera (2001), of which I think the JCA and EIS section will still be approriate. No questions were asked on UML (also not in the mock exams)
I think I should have read an up to date specification/tutorial on Web containers and Servlet/JSP, especially with regard to session management in combination with clustering web servers (two questions)
All in all I think I now have a good preparation for a second time. If I had favourable questions, then probably I would have passed 70 per cent, even without an extensive preparation, but the gradient between passing and failing was steep for me. For the next time, I think I need to concentrate a bit more on:
Connectors/EIS: advantages/possibilities
JSP/JSF/Servlet: comparing technologies in practical applications
load balancing/clustering
security: kind of threats and possible solutions (firewall/DMZ, etc)
encryption: MD5/SHA/DES/DES3/Blowfish
Patterns/J2EE patterns: know them all by heart, including advantages/disadvantages => you can really make points with these
EJB/JPA/JMS..... in practical applications. This also gets a lot of points
JSF/JSP/Servlet: comparison: when to use what: also a source of many questions
JMS/MDB/Web Services/Session Beans: see above
JPA/JDBC/BMP/CMP: pro's and cons
A month should be sufficient...but i'll keep you posted!
Kees
Hope this may be of help for others
