After preparing on and off for a few months I finally sat and fortunately passed the 1Z0-858 Java Enterprise Edition 5 Web Component Developer Certified Professional on 24 June 2014.
My Oracle exam voucher expired on 30 June so there was no more time to procrastinate and/or reschedule, I simply had to do the best I could and sit it!!
Fortunately despite surprise questions around cookies I did well with everything else so obviously my prep material was good enough ;-)
In preparation:
- I had read through and gone through examples of the Charles Lyons book:
http://www.garnerpress.com/catalogue/BK0316/
- I had completed 4 out of the 8 mock exams (would have like to have completed them all but time was not on my side). I was getting mid to high 60%'s. See Enthuware exam for web dev 5.0 here:
http://www.enthuware.com/index.php/mock-exams/oracle-certified-expert/scwcd-questions
- I had read through the Java EE tutorial for further examples, especially around tagging and security. Tutorial here:
http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/5/tutorial/doc/docinfo.html
- I used the Netbeans IDE / Glassfish combination download. I used it on my Ubuntu platform and did find not everything worked, especially around db scripts. There was a bit of messing around but it was usable enough for basic examples for purely exam prep. Download page here:
https://netbeans.org/downloads/6.5.1/. Download the one that includes tomcat and glassfish. I only used glassfish v2.1 because the EE 5 tutorial references glassfish configs etc.
Main reason for wanting to post up my result and story was to alert all those looking at sitting this exam is that there was one gaping hole in both the study guide book and the mock exams was there was next to no detail about cookies and the API around that in the study guide. The Enthuware practice tests had 3 questions around cookies across 8 mock exams.
There were at least 5 questions in my exam specific to cookies!!! Can see from my exam result breakdown this was the area that really killed my final score (cookies in session management section) but I'm just grateful I killed most of the rest!
Your Score: 76% Passing Score: 72% Result: Pass
Section Score
Building JSP Pages Using Standard Actions 4/4
Building JSP Pages Using Tag Libraries 6/8
Building JSP Pages Using the Expression Language (EL) 4/5
Building a Custom Tag Library 4/5
J2EE Patterns 6/6
Session Management 2/7
The JavaServer Pages (JSP) Technology Model 5/7
The Servlet Technology Model 6/6
The Structure and Deployment of Web Applications 7/8
The Web Container Model 4/7
Web Application Security 5/6
Hopefully this helps someone around their exam preparation, especially around the cookie questions!