This user profile was created only to share my experience in SCDJWS exam with you. I have no intention to use it for posting in other forums. I kept my identity as a secret for personal reasons.
Back to the main point, the overall exam difficulty was average. I would say that 60% of the questions were easy while the other 40% were really tough. Most of the questions about
Java APIs were set at a high level with few questions asking about details in JAX-RPC, SAAJ, JAXP and JAXR. You have to be familiar with the tiny details in
SOAP, WSDL and to some extend in UDDI. You don't need to know much about the UDDI Inquiry and publisher API but you have to know about the UDDI data structures. For XML, the focus was on XML namespaces and complex types.
Expect questions in which you are given a scenario and you have to decide based on the given facts, at least 5 in my case. There were a lot of drag and drop questions, at least 7 as far I remember. I was surprised that I got only 2 or 3 questions about security and only 2 questions about deployment.
As far as preparation for the exam, I strongly recommend you to do the following:
read '
J2EE Web Service by Richard Monson-Haefel' at least twice. I have read it only once.
read chapters 2, 3 and 7 from 'Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform'. I have not read the other chapter so someone else might comment on them.
For JAXB, read the first chapter in the J2EE Web Services tutorial.
For WS-Security, chapter 7 from the blueprints is more than enough. For me, I read chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 from 'Securing Web Services with WS-Security by Jothy Rosenberg and David Remy'
Many people were asking Kathy and Bert for a HF-JWS, in my opinion 'J2EE Web Service by Richard Monson-Haefel' is more than enough and there is no need for a HF-JWS. I forget to mention that I had no prior experience in web services.
