Guide to the Exam

Part I

There are 48 Questions, 75 minutes.

Subjects included a lot of EJB, A reasonable amount, but easy level of UML what methods were called by what in the sequence diagrams, what the relationship between classes and interfaces were in class diagrams. Patterns were covered as much as UML. There were no questions that asked you to name a pattern from UML despite the objectives.

Another question covered the passivation and the effect on resources, another change in EJB 1.1

1) Know EJBs really well (no duh, huh?) to a very detailed level. Understand how the different components of a bean react to events and perform their functions. I'd recommend reading all of the Enterprise JavaBeans book (from O'reilly) except for the first and last chapters and chapters 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 of the EJB 1.1 spec.

2) Know UML diagrams reasonably well. I'd say this means knowing the difference between the generalization and realization symbols - stuff like that. UML Distilled by Fowler should suffice.

3) Know your patterns! Know all the pattern names, know what they are used for, and know how parts of J2EE use patterns. The Design Patterns book will give you most of this.

4) Know the details of the protocols mentioned in the objectives. Know what they do, what they are good/bad for, their mechanics, how they interact with firewalls (where is that mentioned in the objectives?).

5) Know the details of Applet related security.

6) For questions with multiple answers the test tells you how many correct answers there are. This made things much easier.

7) There are some things that are obvious holdovers from the old test. Not too many but I was a little surprised.

8) There are a few strangely/badly worded questions on the test. Don't let them rattle you. I think Sun needs to do another pass at editing the questions.

The first five questions are about design patterns including proxy, iterator, observer, faccade.

There are two questions about internalization.

About 10 questions about ejb including bean life cycle, transaction isolation, security.

There is no question specifically to ejb API.

One question about applet security.

There are many questions about common architecture and ejb application.

Sun gives a lengthy scenerio and asks you to pick the appropriate ones.

At least 3 questions have up to 7 answer options. It is really time comsuming to read scenerio and analyze the answer options, especially when the options are not easy to pick, and I have go through the process of elimination. When I see these lengthy questions, I mark them to answer later. First, because these questions are time comsuming. Second, other short questions may refresh my overall memory about j2ee and provide info to select the corrects answers (or eliminate the wrong answers).

There are about 4 questions about UML where a exhibiting diagram is given and asking for the association, generalization, mupliplicity.

About 3 questions about protocols such as communicate between emulator applet to terminal server through firewall (only port number 80 and 433 are allowed through fire wall).

I remember there are 2 answer options about DNA load balancing ( I don't know how DNA fit to J2EE architect. I know J2EE architect have many advanges over DNA (Microsoft Distributed interNetwork Architect).

About 3 questions about scalability, manability,etc..


Part II

Is a J2EE design project. The reference J2EE implementation is the Petstore, so the best strategy would be to reverse engineer the Petstore (it's over 100 classes) and then alter it to suit the design project.
The project states that not all methods and member variables are incuded. I think further simplification to 30 or so classes is justified too.

Part III

4 questions and 90 minutes. These questions are all related to Part II. I was hard pressed to find much more than a paragraph to say about each of the questions. Part II and Part III are marked together, so make sure that you keep things consistent!