Chris Lexington

Jesus,

Sun 1 is my AS of choice for web services.

Jesus Angeles,

The material is out there. You'll have to do some searching though. I found RMH's book the most important of all. Now that there will be a book out specifically for the exam, (I believe the author is Habibi), perhaps you should start there. For me, the most difficult part was actually building web services. Most of the products out there are not as mature as they could be. I ran into bug after bug, which really taxed my learning efforts. I became well aquainted with JBoss, Jonas, Sun 1 AS and various versions of Tomcat in order to implement/practice the exam objectives. None of these products will let you implement everything you'll need to know for the exam alone. Does this answer your questions? Also, the study materials by MZ helped me as well.

https://coderanch.com/t/139787/sr/certification/SCDJWS-hour-ago

Little variance in my scrores with respect to each objective category ...
Questoins on WSDL were no-brainers ...
More UDDI questions that I had anticipated ...
Still trying to figure out why there were 6 or 7 EJB questions.

Hardest exam I've ever taken, including anything I saw in college.

I don't know how much of this is news to you, but here goes.

Unmarshalling means moving XML to and an object tree, Marshalling means the reverse. In JAXB, there is an Unmarshaller object and a Marshaller object. The Unmarshaller does validation, the marshaller does not. There is also a way to perform validation anytime you want (programmatically), but I have never used that feature.

I am studying for the SCDJWS exam and have a few questions on what to study. I have read "J2EE Web Services" (author, R.M-H) and "Building Web Services with Java" (published by Sams, var. authors) . The first question is, how unprepared will I be if I neglect "Blue Prints" (by Sun)?

The second question has more to do with getting hands on experience. I get little J2EE web service experience at work right now and I am spending time just building web services w/ Axis at home. My 'problem' with Axis is that they make it too easy I can crank out web services with Eclipse's wizards all day and night but I don't learn the objectives. Furthermore, what I do learn, although an asset in and of itself, may not be on the exam. For example, which descriptors are on the exam, webservices.xml or *.wsdd ?

One more question for this post: what is the best framework to pick up in order to prepare for the exam ? I need something to experiment with.

I have a few concerns about the SCWSD exam. When I
was studying for the SCWCD 1.3 exam, it expired one week
before I went to register for it. I subsequently spent a
month studying for 1.4 material . Will this happen for the
SCWSD exam anytime soon? I am especially concerned because
many of the protocal specifications that are objectives for
the current SCWSD exam are now obselete. For example, I
would hate to spend all this time learning WSDL 1.1 and SOAP
1.1 (both are exam objectives on the current SCWSD exam) and
then have to learn WSDL 2.0 and SOAP 1.2 (which have been out for a while).

Originally posted by rahul_mkar:
what is the difference between the above two. The specification does not demarcate the above two's responsibilities.
Regds.
Rahul.

Correct, there is no difference at the moment. The server is
the software that holds containers. It probably passes network
connections around between clients and EJB objects in most current implementations.
Containers contain EJBs, and provide access to underlying services such as resource pooling, transaction management, persistence, loadbalancing etc.
Currently, both functions are rolled into each vendors J2EE platform.
Having a conceptual split allows future vendors to concentrate on the areas they know best so that in theory, you could some day run a BEA container in an IBM server. (e.g. if IBM built an AS/400 EJB server that ran 100% Java containers, non-IBM shops could build portable containers)

Originally posted by Jeff Young:
Has anyone taken Sun's prep course for the Developer exam (SL-285) and then taken the Developer exam? I took SL-285 and found it to be pretty easy. I think my instructor was a little lame in the sense of not really covering a lot of stuff, but the material covered seems to be a lot simpler than what I have heard the test covers (and what's in the RHE book for instance). Any insight?
Thanks,
Jeff

Don't know if it's still relevant, but when I did the SL-285, the recommendation was to spend 3-6 months programming before doing the certification. The course was not helpful in either my work or in getting the SCJD, but was very enjoyable nontheless :-)
For SCJD, you can do the exam by downloading the assignment and cutting and pasting code creatively from the numerous bits of Java on the web, or by getting a group together and cutting and pasting each others code or any number of other short cuts. Or you can learn the language properly, program loads and then go pass the exam. Difference is, the certification will be worth something to you the second way !

Originally posted by J Fitzryan:
I just received my developer certification. The biggest surprises of the entire process were on the written exam. It only took 15 minutes but there were some tricky questions. I recommend that future test takers do some reading on the technologies used in the project.

Wow ! I'm amazed that the written exam took 15 mins. I just passed the 1.1 Developers exam, and had 18 seconds left on the clock out of 90 mins. I thought at the time that I'd blown it, as I spent 40 mins on the first question, and ran short on time near the end.