Appu Chan

I have studied the IBM course material that was supplied to me by my employer. Did not go through much other e-books. I initially took the 664 exam, which was pretty easy and doesn't need much prep other than understanding the terminologies used by IBM. 667 was a bit more involved and there were a few questions on IBM specific methodologies and tools. See a few sample questions below from various training sites. Actual Qs are not very different.

**********
Question:
A mortgage loan provider currently has legacy applications utilized by a network of branches and franchised agents. They want to expand by adding a new channel to allow independent mortgage brokers to submit mortgage loan applications. They realize they must provide a differentiating offering to the independent mortgage brokers to attract participants and grow the new channel. How can SOA benefit their requirement?

A. By building an SOA with a secure connectivity layer, they could quickly enable the mortgage broker channel to use their applications without any changes to the legacy system.
B. They could reduce the cost to develop new applications needed for each independent broker by reusing services as integration code that is written for each broker's system to expedite development.
C. By service enabling the legacy applications and offering a Web-based portal for independent brokers, they can minimize
the impact to existing channels, minimize changes to existing code, and quickly create an offering for the new channel.
D. By implementing security and governance as part of an SOA deployment, they can control access to the current system to determine which brokers are using the system and personalize their marketing to the high usage brokers.

**********
Question:
Several design considerations have to be taken into account when designing services in an SOA. Which statement, as applied to those design considerations, is true?

A. Stateless implies that service operation parameters should be allied to the operation semantics.
B. Loose coupling implies that services should be designed using standardized interfaces and with the adoption of open standards.
C. Service granularity implies the service consumer does not hard-code the specific location of the service.
D. Encapsulation implies that services should hide the implementation details from their interface design.

**********
Question:
A rapidly growing retail company recently outsourced their package delivery to a very reputable package delivery company. The two companies are integrated using SOA and Web services. However, the retail company is having customer satisfaction issues as the call center is not reliably calculating delivery dates. Which portion of the SOA Foundation is the
focus to resolve this issue?

A. Information Services
B. Process Services
C. Partner Services
D. Interaction Services

Originally posted by Manish Hatwalne:


Exactly!!!
Couldn't agree more. In fact, such naive "best" questions often show that you're perceiving things without realizing the various frames of references & preferences.

Same here. I wish the answers for such questions were available and then the world would have had only the "best options" left with only the "best people".

Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
.....
Unlike cats, which must have meat to survive, human beings are quite capable of thriving on a meatless diet, and no few of us would certainly do better cutting back on the Big Macs. My own personal bent is that animals don't like to be killed any more than I would, so I try to oblige them. I can't classify myself as vegetarian, but I do prefer to keep the body count down. And frankly, this idea that people crave meat is purely psychological. While I can enjoy the occasional well-prepared meat dish, if I never had meat again it wouldn't ruin my gustatory life. Plus, I don't have to work as hard to keep my cholesterol down.

So, in short, don't let your diet constrain you. If you try, you'll probably find enough meat, and who knows - you might even discover you like the vegetarian life.

Excellent writeup Tim, except for the cat part! We used to have many cats at my home which were pure veggies! We feed them milk and all the normal food we cook at home including rice, sambar, roti etc and it used to eat and be happy. I think food is more about what one is used to than what one should take.

Btw, I am born in a vegetarian family but likes non-veg partly due to curiosity and a traveling job. I also enjoy food from various places and dont have any restrictions.

I have cleared 667 last month. I have some course material along with some of related ebooks for preparation. It was sufficient for me as I also have good experience in SOA using IBM technologies.

I recently completed the following certifications. I am already an SCEA.

IBM 664: 95%
IBM 667: 88%
TOGAF certified practitioner (waiting for certificate)

Thanks to my employer who sponsored all these programs!

Now I have few questions:

A) Are the above mentioned, supported in weblogic 9.2 application server? If so, are there any deployment descriptor settings involved?

B) Is executing local/non-jta transaction SLOW in an application server that supports only JTA environment.

C) Does Spring's non-jta transaction manager usage overrides the default support of weblogic for JTA transactions?
If not what is the benefit of using Spring in weblogic in my application scenario, apart from the configuration based Dependency injection?

A. Default Weblogic Transaction Manager (weblogic.transaction.TransactionManager)supports JTA and you should not have any problem.

B. There is no impact on local transactions in a JTA enabled App server

C. In a transaction that involves both your Weblogic Transaction Manager through SLSBs and Spring Transaction Manager, its the common denominator that will affect the transaction. If you want your transaction to support JTA when working with Spring POJOs, you need to configure Spring to use the appropriate JTA transaction manager, preferably the same one used by Weblogic. Else, if you have just one resource (DB), stick with the defaults.

See the Spring Txn management doc. Especially look at the box titled "Is an application server needed for transaction management?"

http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/transaction.html

Howie

Seen another thread on this...
searching large file

Is it a hard requirement that you must do it through a Java program? Else its is always better to use the DB vendors bulk-loading utilities. This can be invoked through some shell scripts/batch files to make things easier. This also makes more sense if you are not doing any additional processing with the data before upload.

I think the delay you found in your second attempt was probably because of commit operations happening more frequently than the earlier case. You need to look at the batch size in each case.

Howie

A profiler has nothing to do with IDE. Some IDEs do provide plugins to incorporate profiler features. But that is more of a convenience than a requirement.

Typical profilers like jprobe will require that the profiled application be started from the profiler console. They normally create a custom appserver startup script based on your current script so that it can instrument the application. This also means that most of the profilers are not hot-swappable within a running application. You need to restart the application from the profiler and stop after profiling is done.

There are many opensource profilers also available, which are "minimally" intrusive. Most of them are developed using AOP with runtime weaving of applications. Examples include, cougar, jamon, infrared etc

Jprobe is not expected to be used in a production environment. It adds its own overhead to the application which could be upto 20%. You may probably use some non-intrusive monitoring tools on your prod env like Jamon, Sitescope or Topaz, if you dont have access to load testing environment to test with jprobe.

The application failure when load increases may be due to various factors including issues with the application and also lack of sufficient hardware resources like memory, processor, network etc

Regarding usage of jprobe, you can configure it to profile your entire application classes or any specific objects.
[ June 12, 2006: Message edited by: Howard Chan ]

Java IO APIs are typical examples for Decorator pattern.

Decorators are often used when subclassing requires a large number of subclasses to support every possible combination needed – so many that subclassing becomes impractical. The Java IO library requires many different combinations of features which is why the decorator pattern is a good approach.

GE must be General Electric. This is a big American MNC

Howie

As mentioned above, this can be implemented best using DB persistence. When a user logs in, update some flag in the DB against that user. When another login is attempted with the same username, you can check against this flag before proceeding.

Appu.

Theory about "only IT professionals" getting good pay is not really correct. If you look at the current pay packets in other industries like Banking, Pharma, Investment, Insurance, Auto etc, they are also quite good. Ofcourse I mean the pvt sector only as of now. I read an article recently about the MD of the govt owned Indian Oil Corp is paid only about Rs 8 lacs per annum, whereas the pvt sector Reliance Petro MD gets Rs 6 crores! Most of these pvt cos pay a starting salary of atleast 2 lacs pa for fresh recruits as well.

The main reason is good overall growth of economy and huge demand for educated/skilled people. However our education system is not able to cope up, driving demand-supply gap higher. Look at the demand for professionals in insurance and airlines industry where we have a big gap in education. Even though the salaries will remain quite high, the growth rate may slow down once the supply of manpower and other infra resources increase.

Appu.

I know of HP.

HP - B1 Visa - US$50 (in Class 1 cities, $45 in others) perdiem + conveyance in actuals + co provided acco
Western Europe - 50Euros per diem + conv + acco
L1 Visa - 55K to 85K depeding on location and experience
H1 Visa - 60K to 90K depeding on location and experience


Many other cos give about $60 per diem + conv + acco for B1 trips

There are companies which gives $10 + others at actuals also! (eg, Dell for B1)

I heard IBM gives $35 per diem

There is acute shortage of people with 4-6 years experience in tyhe job market. This is due to the tech meltdown in post 2k (2000-01) period resulting in many people opting out of IT jobs. So this set of people are the luckiest ones currently!

Appu.