Nicholas Way

I was also at JavaOne - there's some truth in what you say, though I actually found the sessions very mixed, some excellent (not least Joshua "Effective Java" Bloch) and some less good. I just accepted that not all the presenters were as entertaining as him, but as long as the material was interesting, considered my attendance worthwhile. And if a presentation wasn't relevant, there was plenty else to do - the Pavilion in particular was a great place to meet people, and get invited to evening events, such as the excellent Sun Certification party, or a live podcast from the Java Posse gang. I certainly learned a lot during the week, and would go again.

While I was revising for the exam, I found the XML examples in Head First weren't clear enough in where they fitted into the ejb-jar.xml file. For that reason, I would recommend going through the DTD section in the official spec as, although it's not very readable, it does show exactly how the DD is put together, and what tags are allowed in what other ones. What I did, which certainly helped, was to make my own dummy DD file, with just the tags (no content), to learn the structure of the file. Obviously I can't be specific about what was in the exam, but you do need to know the DD syntax.

To go with the SCWCD last month. Phew ...
[ April 05, 2006: Message edited by: Nicholas Way ]

HF deliberately leave out answers to some "sharpen your pencil" sections, on the grounds that we should check back ourselves. But for the record, I don't agree with this, as you could convince yourself of a wrong answer, and thus not know it was wrong all the way to the exam. And assuming many readers are studying for the exam, there's no incentive to "cheat".

Any comments from Kathy or Bert?

In the servlet spec, there's a nice diagram that shows the relationships between elements in the web.xml file. Anyone know where I can find a similar one for the EJB DD file? The DTD is not the most readable thing in the world ...

According to the spec (table on page 90), a stateless session bean can call getEJBObject from its ejbCreate() method. My understanding is that ejbCreate() is called when the bean is created, which does not necessarily relate to any client interaction, which means, presumably, that there will be no EJBObject. Is this right, and if so, what happens when getEJBObject is called in such a case. Does it return null (which can be checked for in code), or does it throw an exception?

Just did it today, and - this being Oscar week and all - I'd just like to thank Bert and Kathy for HFSJ, and netbeans.org for their IDE.
[ March 07, 2006: Message edited by: Nicholas Way ]

Page 637, the pictures asking which roles have access given a DD fragment. In the second example, the DD fragment has only role-name "Guest", and yet the picture shows only Member crossed out, not Admin.

Sorry if someone's already mentioned this ...

So what does "beanName" do that "class" doesn't?

I was wondering about this, in particlar the TRACE and OPTIONS methods. Is there a default implementation - doTrace() and doOptions() - of these in HttpServlet, or would you have to write it yourself (and if so, what would you put in it)?

There was a product called something like "My Brain" that displayed complex structures as linked nodes; if you clicked on one node, it centered it in the screen and showed all linked nodes on the periphery. Struck me as a good (GUI) model for displaying family tree. Also thinking of writing an app of this kind, as my mother's cousin has just spend some time compiling the information for our family.