Passed with 89%

[Gennady Shapiro]

Just want to share my experiences, hopefully it'll help someone.
1. Overall the exam was considerably easier than I expected, but not exactly trivial.
2. I have read people been seeing initial 10 question being "warm-up" easy question. That was not the case.
3. Not too many Exhibit questions ...maybe 5-7.
4. Descriptors questions are very high-level, I feel kinda stupid for spending lot of time memorizing DTDs. But, you must understand DD elements purpose for being.
5. Had a question involving Template Method design pattern. Have no idea what it is - I think I missed it, otherwise patterns are relatively easy.
6. Tags are a big part of the test. Many questions on return values and related behaivor. No questions on advanced stuff like JSP tag objects, methods of pageContext, buffered outputs, nothing of that nature. Dont let this discorage you from studying it though.
7. Distributed apps was tricky piece. Asked if URL rewriting was prohbited in distributed mode, that seemed like the most reasonable option in multiple choice -- still dont know if thats true. I figured diff apps may have different methods of session traking and cookie would be the lowest common denominator.
8. Java beans - too easy.
9. Threading -- easy , but read closely.
in general I found it very useful to mark a question if you not sure and come back to it later, i think i fixed 2-3 answers like this.
Plenty of time.
Also, dont be fooled be practical experience u may have, this test is mostly academic.

Thanks to all who contributed to this forum. Javaranch has been great, this is my third cert and I've gotten much help especially for project-oriented certifications.

[Guy Allard]

Hi Gennady - Congratulations, I would only add know listeners cold.
Regards, Guy

[jason adam]

Congrats, and thanks for the words of wisdom!
And fyi, the Template Pattern is like this:

public class Super
{
    public abstract void doSomething();
    public void doWork()
    {
        doSomething();
    }
}
public class SubA
{
    public void doSomething()
    {
        //some implementation
    }
}
public class SubB
{
    public void doSomething()
    {
        //some other implementation
    }
}

The general class calls an abstract method that it defines, but lets the specialized classes handle the work. It's quite a nifty pattern, found uses for it in several programs.

[Hema Menon]

Congratulations !
Hema

[John Dahlstrom]

Congrats Gennady! where to now?
-John
SCJP
SCWCD (as of tonight too!)

[Lalu Prasad]

well done gennadi

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Congrats Gennady, and thanks for a very good analaysis on the exam...

[Axel Janssen]

congrats Gennady
thanks for the analysis
Axel

[Peter den Haan]

Congratulations, great score - now for the Architect's
- Peter
[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: Peter den Haan ]

[Madhav Lakkapragada]

Congrats.
- satya

[Ian B Anderson]

Congratulations!
Ian

[Mark Spritzler]

Congrats Gennady, now you only have one more to go
Mark

[Madhav Lakkapragada]

7. Distributed apps was tricky piece. Asked if URL rewriting was prohbited in distributed mode, that seemed like the most reasonable option in multiple choice -- still dont know if thats true. I figured diff apps may have different methods of session traking and cookie would be the lowest common denominator.

I had a similar qstn. I think I lost on this qstn.
Mine was more pertinent to SRV.7.7.2.
- satya

[christy smile]

Hi,
So is URL rewriting was prohbited in distributed mode??
Christy

[Gennady Shapiro]

Actually it does make sense.
In a clustered environment you must have a hardware and software proxy-loadbalancer.
Those who works in a large company must've heard of things like Cisco LocalDirector, DNS round robin, or something like Weblogic proxy-loadbalancer.
If I am not mistaken hardware loadbalancers support "passive cookie" loadbalancing mechanism to route requests but not URL-rewriting.
I think that is the reason URL-rewriting is not allowed in distributed environments, although I didnt find anything in servlet spec.
Thoughts anyone?

[Lalu Prasad]

Gennadi,
Heard it makes easy to prepare cheatsheets for patterns, Tag library etc. Do you have any you can share?
Thanks and nice job again

[Reda Mokrane]

Congratulations

[Fei Ng]

Congratulations