Hi everybody !
Well, it took almost two weeks before I decided to share my experience. First of all, thanks Ranchers for tons of useful info posted here! In addition I read HFSJ book , SCWCD study guide 1st edition (I also read a few chapters of 2nd edition in Barnes'n'Nobles) and specs for
Servlet,
JSP and JSTL API. As for specs I used them mostly as a reference, it would take you months to read it all. Now, what did I get -
1) 5-6 questions on design
patterns. Scored 100% here, everything is described pretty clear in HFSJ book. One question required to select 2 patterns, but a combination of Business Delegate and Service Locator was an obvious choice.
2) ~9-10 EL questions, I messed up few of them. Most things were related to the [] operator, how does container process
string literals there and when does it look for bound attributes.
3) 4-5 DD questions, one of them was about <ejb-local-ref> tag.
4) 5-6 different security related questions (a couple related to DD elements, one drag-and-drop).
5) 4 filter related questions. One of them was discussed in the following
thread (too bad it appeared after I passed my exam) -
https://coderanch.com/t/170871/java-Web-Component-SCWCD/certification/Passed-SCWCD-two-cents 6) couple questions requiring good knowledge of HttpSession and ServletRequest API.
7) few JSTL questions. As I remember it was about core set, url, import and param tags. One question asked how to encode URL.
All other questions I remember less clear, it was 2 weeks ago. Nothing really special. One question about tag handlers required knowledge that findAncestorWithClass() is a method of SimpleTagSupport but not of JspContext. There were 4 or 5 similar code fragments and it took me a while to remember that. Ah, very interesting one - there was a question listeners that should be configured in DD. There were 6 listeners thereand I had to select three that must be declared in DD. Given options left me no choice but to include HttpSessionActivationListener there. It was very confusing because I saw threads here where people say that there is no need to specify this listener in DD. Don't know, maybe I misunderstood the question.
Few general comments. I would read more about security. I did not expect that much questions on this topic and got the poorest score for it - 66%. There were no questions about dynamic attributes. I did not expect 4 questions on filters but based on the results it was not that hard.
As for preparation, 3 mock-up
test from SCWCD study guide and final test from HFSJ (46/69) were really helpful ! I also took Sun's and Whizlabs trial tests and couple a few more mocks (listed on JavaRanch). Practice is a must here. Well, that's it. Good luck for those who's going to pass SCWCD in future !
[ November 17, 2005: Message edited by: Dmitry Konyukh ]