Hello guys,
First I wanna thank Asharf in specific for his input, it really guided me to passing this exam.
I have very good experience in enterprise computing, especially with j2ee, but not EJB 3. So preparation for the exam took me much less than what Asharf proposed, around 2 weeks of extensive study (6-8 hrs/day). I passed with a good score (75%), you need 59% to pass. I have no idea what the median score, so if you have it, please let me know.
I can say the 70% of the questions are reasonable (medium level), and if you have the experience, you should get most of them correctly. But there are around 30% were advanced questions, and you need to think it through and prepare.
I used ALL RESOURCES that Ashraf suggested, and they were helpful, however, I wanna emphasize the following:
- Do no neglect Head First Book even though it is for an earlier version for EJB. It covers good topics about transactions, exceptions, security, MDB, and SFSB and SLSB.
- Beside head first, also I gained from P.Sanghera - SCBCD. CX-310-090 Exam Study Kit. Java Business Component Developer Certification for EJB. 2005.
- O'Reilly's book, I suggest using it for annotation, persistence, Session Beans, web services, but that is it. Use other books to cover Exceptions & transactions. In general, for new comers to EJB3 I found the codes examples with JBoss very helpful, especially from persistence.
- I agree with Ashraf, there were many transaction questions, but for me they were reasonable. Where I did very bad was with exceptions and entity operations (you need to know exactly how to use **merge**, find, refresh, remove, ..etc.).
- Pay attention to difference of persistence.xml file in SE and J2EE, especially for default values, how to supply mapping files.
- I got more than once questions about EntityManagerFactory.and @PersistenceUnit, review those.
- Pay especially attention to how security could be overridden in deployment descriptors, there were couple of questions on that. But fairly easy if you use your intuition.
- Very little questions came about Deployment descriptors tags, but pay attention where they are relevant, especially for interceptors & security. So you need to know all annotations in general, they do not ask detailed parameters to those annotations, but general.
- I got ZERO questions about Web Service, all I got was that they ONLY apply for SLSB, no MDB or SFSB.
- Know the services that a container provides, such as mail, jndi, WS support, security, ...etc.
- Regarding MDB, you need to understand the basics very well, such there is no client, so there can be no security assigned, no application exceptions.
- There were couple of question about from where in the life cycle call back methods you can call other EJB, understand those very well.
- I had couple of tricky questions about QL, especially related to fetching associations, and another with updates. Study Persistences exception well and their impact on transaction.
- Have general understanding about JTA how the container uses it.
- For me time was good. I finished 45 minutes before the time limit.
-I suggest if you do not know the answer, start eliminating the other ones, and USUALLY it boils down to one or two possible answers, and your chances are better than one out of four!
- There was one drag and drop question (very simply), do not panic.
- I had ONE question that had 3 answers, but I had over 10 questions with two answers. However, in general the questions that have more than one answer are fairly easy. I found them easier that one answer question.
- All questions were clear except for two questions, so who ever wrote this exam made sure that there is no ambiguity.
Again, I wanna thank ashraf for his help, and I hope you find my notes helpful, and good luck.
Abu Rami,
Chicago
[ December 04, 2007: Message edited by: Abu Rami ]
[ December 04, 2007: Message edited by: Christophe Verre ]
