Who all took beta OCMJEA 6 part 1?

[Amritendu De]

Please share your feedback.

[Mikalai Zaikin]

Not sure how other test takers, but I found most of the beta questions either ambigous or confusing.
Also, I noticed that there is fair amount of questions about antipatterns from Bruce Tate's Bitter Java book(?), which is more than 10 years old.

[Baba Sahbi]

Hello,
Thanks a lot Mikalai Zaikin for your feedback.
If someone else can post his feedback it would be great.
I wanted to ask something :
Are there many questions which are related to JEE 6 "new" features (like Intereceptor, managed bean, bean validation, ejb lite, jax-RS, JASPIC, CDI and DI) ... ?
Thanks and best regards.

[Ethan Zhang]

So which chapters should we "bitter"?

As a old book, I guess JSP and Servlet should be still worth reading. Anything else?

Thanks in advance & Happy Friday!

Ethan

Mikalai Zaikin wrote:Not sure how other test takers, but I found most of the beta questions either ambigous or confusing.
Also, I noticed that there is fair amount of questions about antipatterns from Bruce Tate's Bitter Java book(?), which is more than 10 years old.

[Shiv Swaminathan]

@Mikalai, can you please detail us a little more on your experience:

How different is it from Java EE5?
What kind of preparation do you recommend? (References, materials...etc..)

[Mikalai Zaikin]

Hi,

Can't remember too much about J EE 5 exam, but I felt that new questions were completely re-written, and quality of exam (in my opinion) worsen. Why? Because bigger part of qiestions (maybe 60%) I found either ambigous either confusing. Lot's of scenario-based questions -- this questions pattern was used in old exam, and in the new beta exam (which is not surprising). Don't expect any piece of code in the questions (like in the old exam).

The Design Patterns part is more or less clear. But I noticed that Deepak Alur's "Core J2EE Patterns" patterns still asked (book is published 10 years ago).

I can't be 100% sure, but I did not notice Adam Bien's design patterns in the beta exam, while I anticipated, because his book more up to date.

And as I mentioned above - I was surprised to see antipatterns which are mentioned in the Bruce Tate's "Bitter Java" book (which is also 10 years old).

Exam contains 90 questions in 150 mins (2.5 hrs)

Good luck,
MZ

[Vadym Ba]

I will try on 3 April. It's worth trying for free I'm reading Adam Bien's pattern book and I'm really surprised, that there is no questions about this topic.

[Shiv Swaminathan]

@Mikalai, Thank you for the guidelines.

[Esteban Herrera]

Today I took the beta exam.

I completely agree with Mikalai.

Many questions are ambiguous. I found myself reading the question two or three times to understand what the problem was about. I even remember one question that was not completely technology related because it involved some management decision and it left you with some assumptions to make about that decision. Many scenario-based questions (what technology would you use/what do you recommend if X and Y), best-practice questions, nothing about UML or exhibits with images, a few "What of the following statements are true about X" questions. Also, like Mikalai, I don't remember about the JEE 5 exam, but I can tell you that I had never used all the time allowed for a certification exam, but for the above reasons, this time was not the case.

I received a free voucher and didn't prepare for the exam, so I can't recommend any resources. Instead, I can recommend you to study the following topics (in no particular order):
Antipatterns like golden hammer, leaky abstractions, hot potato.
Java Cryptography Architecture
Java Connector Architecture
JMS and Web services integration patterns
Components and best practices about SOA architectures
Best practices about logging and security
How to mitigate security attacks
Drawbacks about JPA, CMP and JDBC
Design patterns stated in the objectives (Facade, Strategy, Dependency Injection, Payload Extractor, etc.)
Technologies used to communicate with remote services or external systems like JMS, RMI and Web Services (with XML over HTTP, JSON, SOAP and REST)
What advantages give us a three-tier architecture over a two-tier architecture concerning non-functional requirements

This is all I can remember right now, feel free to ask me any specific question you may have.

[Baba Sahbi]

Many thanks Esteban for your feedback !
Did you have any code-related question (questions on APIs, deployment descriptor tags..) ?
Thanks and best regards.

[Esteban Herrera]

No questions about API. No code either.

About deployment descriptors I remember one or two of the type "Select two ways in which you can achieve X" that have the option deployment descriptor as a possible answer. I hope it helps you.

[Baba Sahbi]

Thanks Esteban, your posts are really helpful.

[Shiv Swaminathan]

Thank you @Mikalai and @Esteban for your guidance.
Finally I took the upgrade exam and your tips and guidance were very helpful.
My experience/thoughts...for the future exam takers:

1. Be by the exam objectives (except that you have some additional J2EE core patterns to read)
2. Mark Cade and Humphrey Sheil's guide for Java EE 5 is your Bible (I saw some questions from his book's 'Review Your Progress' sections also, but his guide is definitely needed)
3. Adam Bien's Rethinking Java Patterns book a must for Design Patterns (mostly concentrate on the chapter on Infrastructure Patterns and Utilities)
4. Deepak Alur's Core J2EE's Patterns book, you need to know the Presentation tier patterns. I did not see questions on patterns related to other tiers, though some choices had some business tier patterns.
5. Anti-patterns Hot Potato, Leaky Abstractions and Golden Hammer - especially look for scenarios where this can happen - in business tier, web tier or... and is it during messaging or persisting or... 'Bitter Java' and 'Bitter EJB' books can help reference some of these anti-patterns
6. Read through security well, where to apply and how to achieve for an application/system, and also know the different level of security you can provide for application, like message level, transport level and which one provides end-end security, and how are they related to underlying layer, and must know the web application security issues like XSS and SQL Injection, man in the middle, DoS kinds...and how to mitigate them..
7. Go through the JEE 6 Tutorial - at a high level on concepts for webservices, JPA, transactions etc and their applicability..., no need for code or spec.
8. When to use JAX-WS and when to go for JAX-RS, same way for combination of these with Stateful or Stateless scenarios
9. JMS and JCA applicability and when to use these technologies and when to go for webservices...
10. When to go for web-centric or when to go for EJB centric applications
11. The QoS elements against the 2 or 3 tier applications, like making a application 2-tier vs 3 tier, what are the kind of loss or gains you get on performance, maintainability, manageability etc...

No questions on UML and there were no exhibits.
There are some questions which were not clear...and some questions has unclear answer options...

Read the questions well and answer...Time yourself and try to finish within 2 hours and use the last 1/2 hour for reviewing...I could review only last 10 minutes and I had a bunch of questions marked for review (almost all ;) ...I could review only few of them...

All the Best!!!

[Baba Sahbi]

Thanks a lot Shiv Swaminathan for sharing your feedbacks.
I have a question (sorry it may sound stupid ):
When you say Leaky Abstractions, is that the name of an anti-pattern ? How do we identify it ?
Thanks and best regards.

[Shiv Swaminathan]

@Baba

Leaky Abstraction is an anti pattern. Actually its an anti-Service Facade pattern in Java world. I will just outline a little bit on this and give some references for more reading:

When abstractions prove to be a problem then they are considered leaky.
For eg: In case of a Service Facade, it acts as an abstract layer between presentation and business logic/data. It hides the complexity, makes a single point of entry, loosely couples ...blaah blaah blaah ...all good things about abstraction. But for certain cases this abstract layer might prove to be unnecessary, like when you know the client or presentation tier objects are directly related to your server side data objects say the persistent domain objects (PDO), the transformation is unnecessary, and when the user action in the presentation tier decides when their PDO changes are stored and when not, the business logic cannot be expressed in service-oriented manner, with self-contained, atomic and independent services, and further more, if combining PDO's to create a single client object view becomes very complex, the abstraction through the service facade becomes leaky, causing unwanted complexity and performance overhead. In this case we can expose the PDO's directly to the presentation layer, following the guidelines of a Gateway pattern which is a manifestation of Leaky abstraction.

There are other conceptual examples of leaky abstractions in www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

Refer to Adam Bien's "Real World Java EE Patterns, Rethinking Best Practices", PDO and Gateway pattern.

Remember leaky abstractions apply only for certain usecases, and if they are not applied rightly, they also have drawbacks. (Check Gateway disadvantages in Adam Bien book).

[Baba Sahbi]

Thanks a lot Shiv Swaminathan for the detailed explanation. Things are clearer now !

[Baba Sahbi]

Hi all,
I finally took the beta exam last week and I totally agree with what has been said above.
I found most of the questions ambiguous and difficult. Many questions require you to pick multiple choices which are far from being trivial.
For example, I faced the following situation many times :
A long scenario, then a question to choose benefits of a certain technology which makes it the best choice for this scenario - all choices are REALLY benefits of this technology - A real headache ...
Also, a lot of questions to choose the best option between JAX-WS/JAX-WS HTTPS/JAX-RS/JAX-RS HTTPS...
I even had questions about management options (whether you continue a project or you stop it )
I don't think that there were many questions related to JEE6 new technologies, 95% of the questions could be asked in the JEE5 certification.
I don't know what the exam writers wanted to test in candidates, but I think that the exam doesn't really evaluate the theoretical knowledge concerning JEE6 platform.
I wish good luck for people who are still willing to take the beta exam (maybe things will get better with the final release of the exam).
Feel free to ask if you need further information.
Best regards.

[Vadym Ba]

I can't add anything to it. I took it yesterday too. 90 questions 150 minutes were really too much. Some of them were really long and confusing. I had to reread some question many times to understand the core problem. I was really tired an the end and lost a bit of concentration. Not too much about J2EE 6, as I expected

[Massimo Sperossi]

I'm wondering if there are any questions about when and why to use singleton EJBs rather than stateless EJBs

Best regards.

[Baba Sahbi]

Hello Massimo ,
As far as I am concerned, I didn't see a single question about singleton EJB.
BR

[Massimo Sperossi]

Baba Sahbi wrote:
As far as I am concerned, I didn't see a single question about singleton EJB.
BR

Many thanks

[Mihai Lihatchi]

So today I also took the test.
I will confirm the questions as in the objectives PLUS : Core J2EE Patterns (some of them were removed with the new Java EE 5).

Lots of patterns from GoF (some not mentioned in the objectives).
Also references to LeakyAbstraction and HotPotato
Webservices as mentioned above :JAX-RS vs. JAX-WS combined with security/asynchronous approach. In general the integration questions were also the most difficult during the other SCEA Part 1 (also beta).
Also references to singleton session beans and comparison with stateful session beans -so EJB3.1 is on the exam clearly.
Two questions about SOA (hmm zero experience there for me so I chose some answers that looked right).
At some points I felt the exam was getting too much into details of JPA (but since I only have experience with the Hibernate implementation it looked to me that way).
Regarding web-layer : Some questions involving JSF. My first instinct is to REJECT JSF but some usecases just demand it.
The interesting part was about deciding on hardware for the platform .. that was mostly a managerial issue (time/costs constraints) and I tried to provide a good answer but I never was in such a position.
My feeling is the exam is more difficult than SCEA 5 PART 1.
Although there was plenty of time I bearly made the second pass properly. Some questions seemed to lack a second option and were a huge time drain (maybe this is what you found ambiguous too).
Preparation time : 2 weeks part-time. Books : Mostly the ones for SCEA-5 plus reading on anti-patterns and Adam Biens presentations. I have a copy of "Don't make me think" but to handle just one tiny objective about ui design principles it seemed like an overkill.
Should be one of the last to take the beta so hopefully this post is relevant for part 1 (real one)

Well anyhow since there is still a training course involved I do not think I will try again if I fail this one . Anybody knows about the "upgrade path" to SCEA/OCMJEA 6 ?

[Mohgly Mowgli]

I just took the beta exam after 2 days of grueling study. First of all, thanks to my Boss to give an opportunity to take a day off to study and take the exam in the middle of our project deadlines.

Thanks to Adam Bien for his Real world Java EE patterns - wonderful book, explained the patterns and code very clearly
Also, thanks to Amritendu for his study book and Code Ranch forum.

I didn't have much time to prepare for the exams. So I planned to take the exam today and to prepare for 2 full days, without touching the laptop. Just studied three books - Real world Java EE patterns, The Java EE6 Tutorial and Amritendu's OCMJEA5 study book. But there are so much to read - overwhelming to cover all the tiers, services, patterns, apis, etc in 2 days. But it provided me a study platform to skim through many areas, which I will be using in my projects.

Back to beta exam - I feel like the exam is good and tough. Almost all the exam questions were from the exam topics. I didn't feel any question is out of the topic - some may be indirect, but they all are based on the objectives of the exam.

The tougher and time consuming part was a paragraph questions with multiple answers (select two or three) with 5 or 6 answers.

Questions related to patterns - Abstract Factory, Singleton, Decorator, Web service broker, Composite View, Thread Tracker, Strategy, View Helper, Async Interactions, Session Facade, Service Activator - I got questions for all of these patterns.

Amritendu - your study book is good, helpful - but the questions and answers so trivial. for eg, in the patterns section, many questions were just trivial advantages and drawbacks with only 4 choices.

But in the beta exam, they gave a problem and asked what pattern will you apply to solve it? It is little more critical thinking, not trivial in answering the questions. Many questions were explained the real scenarios and what an architect will do to design it using what services, java ee technology and pattern.

For example, some of the questions about acquisition of companies, one of them with Java product and other non-Java - how you integrate with what tech, services and patterns? how the NFRs of the existing two tier and proposed new 3-tier?

I am hoping that I will pass the exam.

Thanks for everybody on sharing their beta exam experience.

[naresh kumar nand]

Yesterday I appeared for the beta exam, Initially I felt time will not be sufficient for this exam as it will be based on lengthy and tricky questions which may be time consuming but it was well sufficient and last 8 mins were used for reviewing few questions.

Exam was like testing everything, technologies related to old still valid as well as new.
Few questions of this exam which are available in Mock exams or the real exam of Java EE 5 part 1 will occur.
They were good number of questions on patterns covering from "Real World Java EE patterns, Rethinking Best practices" by Adam Bien and few on Core JEE patterns, design patterns and anti patterns. Around 4 to 5 questions were on WebServices JAX-WS/JAX-RS and their security measures.
They were good number of scenario based questions where old as well as new technologies like Swing, JAX-RS.
Questions related to high level understanding of Java EE 6.
Not to mention about the security related questions which were many in my exam.
Questions related to JPA/JCA/JMS/JDBC.
As few others have mentioned there were questions related to managerial decision about the current situation.

Overall my intension was to go through the material related to Java EE 6 and its really good to know about the book by Adam Bien's, I am still wondering how I missed this while preparing for Java EE 5, I am sure there are few more like these. In fact its good to know about these things at least by preparing for such exams.

Thanks,
Kumar.