Mike Cogan

I found the Professional EJB book from Wrox Press was good and also it was reduced when I bought it. RevisingSCBCD may be useful to you.
[ April 20, 2004: Message edited by: Mike Cogan ]

I said I'd get back quick.
I haven't been able to speak to my contact but I found this
https://coderanch.com/t/152141/java-Architect-SCEA/certification/New-Version-SCEA-exam

I passed at the start of this month but wanted to put my score on this forum and hadn't got round to it.
I got 90% which I wasn't totally happy about as I thought I could have done better. But I became a dad less than a month before the exam so I'm happy I managed to take it at all (with the whole sleep deprivation thing).
As part of the preparation for the exam I read the spec, wrote questions for www.ejbcertificate.com , used EJB since EJB 1.0, wrote www.revisingscbcd.co.uk , read professional EJB and read Head First EJB. I did the whizlabs demo practise exam, did my end of chapter questions and did questions on www.ejbcertificate.com.
I think I should have taken the exam sooner as I was starting to get bored of revising. I would also recommend not reading bitter EJB until after the exam! It's a great book but it does make it harder to be motivated to learn the Entity Bean CMP detail.

Hi,
The EJB spec says that,

Accessing resource managers and enterprise beans is disallowed in the session bean methods
for which the Container does not have a meaningful transaction context or client security context.

It also says that

If a session bean instance attempts to access a resource manager or an enterprise bean, and that access is
not allowed (as state by the spec), the behavior is undefined by the EJB architecture.

So your code in theory could work it's just not gauranteed to work in all EJB containers. This hurts your EJB's potential for reusability.
HFEJB is saying what is mandated by the spec so you will need to know it for the exam.
Hope this helps,
Mike

Thanks for the info, just received confirmation .
I've started reading J2EE web services and it is a pleasure to read. The content seems very well aligned with the objectives of the beta. If I get enough time I'll make some mock questions for people to practise on and put them on one of my sites (probably similar to the SCBCD flash questions). I'll keep everyone posted, only got until 23rd so they may be a bit rough and ready.

Just focus on the topics covered by Head First EJB. The book covers all the topics you will need to know to pass the exam.
The areas I would recommend focusing on in Mastering EJB would be EJB-QL, deployment descriptors and security. There are no design pattern questions in the SCBCD exam.
If you have used EJB technology before (and this does mean a lot of CMP Entity beans as well) I think you could revise and pass the exam in about a month and a half.

Sorry scratch that, I thought it had already been released earlier this year. I'm pretty sure that they were going to release a beta for this exam pretty soon, I'll check with my sources and get back to you.

The beta version of this exam has already been released so I am holding off on revision for the exam until they release it.
The content of the current SCEA does not include quite a few accepted technologies that are now available. I'd recommend holding off, especially as this cert is that much more involved.

Does anyone have any news on when the SCJP exam aimed at the 1.5 version will be out?

I received one of the emails from prometric regarding the beta of this exam and replied as soon as I could (I thought that just over a month to revise for an exam was quite a good time ).
I have bought Richard's Web Services book and have started reading it so am happily preparing for it.
Only problem is I haven't had notification that I have been assigned a voucher. Does anyone know how long it will take for confirmation?

I took the SCBCD exam at the start of April and I am finding I am still asking myself the question "what questions did I get wrong?". The reason I am unsure is that I am pretty comfortable with the subject matter and I can also remember the questions that I was at all unsure of (and I checked them after the exam to make sure I answered correctly).
Does anybody know how often they review the questions for the Certification exams in case of obscure or unclear wording? I think one of the big problems that probably happens is that people pass the exam and then don't actually worry about the questions that they missed.
I must admit I didn't actually comment on any of the questions as I thought I was doing ok on them.

Hi Mikalai,
First thanks for the positive feedback (27/10/03) on JDiscuss regarding www.revisingscbcd.co.uk much appreciated.
To understand why you need to implement these methods you need to understand how the container works and how it provides callback methods to the entity bean (also what callback methods are). You may find it useful reading the EJB specification starting at about 10.7.7 (regarding entity bean lifecyle).
I will be posting some examples of entity beans soon on my site so it may be worth running through a few of them to get to grips with what is actually happening to the "empty" methods.
Good luck with the exam,
Mike Cogan
[ November 14, 2003: Message edited by: Mike Cogan ]
[ November 14, 2003: Message edited by: Mike Cogan ]