Is it worth the effort to take SCWCD these days (due to the growth of advanced web frameworks etc.)?

[Pad Ven]

Hi all,
Can the experts in the forum kindly help me understand whether the SCWCD exam is still useful these days when most of the web UI design is heading towards the popular frameworks? How much value does this certification have in industry now as opposed to say a few years back? Is it still worthwhile to put in all the hard work and take this exam when there are better web component tools in the industry?

Thanks and regards,
Padmanabhan V

[Christophe Verré]

These frameworks use things like tags, EL... The views are also mostly JSP based. Some of the configuration is also related to things you learn in SCWCD (servlet mappings...). I think it's good to know what's going on behind the scene. I think that SCWCD is a very interesting certification in that way.

[Pad Ven]

Hi Christophe ,
Thank you very much for the explanation. Basically I was confused whether to take the exam or not. Your explanation motivates to take this exam.

Regards,
TV Padmanabhan

[Piotr Nowicki]

@Pad - BTW, take a look at this article: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?track=NL-461&ad=790558&thread_id=61023&asrc=EM_NLN_12619056&uid=8240090

[Pad Ven]

Hi Pedro,
That article was interesting. But does that mean Spring is going to lose favor in the industry given that it is now very popular? Will learningSpring (and probably thinking of getting certified by SpringSource) be not that much worth it anymore?

Regards,
Pad

[Piotr Nowicki]

Pad, I am very far away from being an expert in this area, but I can say what I think will happen ;-)

Major companies which decided to use Spring won't jump into JEE6 at the moment or even in the near future. Firstly it's because enterprise software doesn't like rapid changes and secondly because they learned from the procedural -> objective oriented programming "hurray" change.

The other thing to remember is that the Spring was introduced because of too complexed design of JEE in it's early versions (up to 1.4). JEE 1.6 with introducing profiles, dependency injection, new JSF, enhanced JPA, Bean Validation, etc. is not only more easy to use but it also introduces features which only Spring had up to now. In the same time it gives you (theoretically speaking) an ability to change the vendor/implementor of a particular part of your system and not be binded to the Spring Source whole time.

So, the bottom line is that JEE6 is a very interesting platform to build enterprise software and, in my opinion, it is the future. On the other hand I don't think it will make "old" Spring applications to be rewritten "just-like-that". Spring will be the most favorited solution for a long time.

I think that making a certificate path which bases on Spring solution is a good idea, because there still will be many companies which will continue to use it, and they can become your potential employer :-)

Cheers!

[Pad Ven]

Hi Pedro,
Thank you once again for the clarification. I found it informative and useful.
Thanks,
Pad