SCBCD 5.0 Beta Exam Review

Just took the Beta Exam today, it’s really a nightmare. Since it is a beta exam, I guess Sun want to deliver all the questions it has to the tester and evaluate the question difficulties and degree of appropriate.

The exam I took lasts for 5 hours, with 180 questions within. Compared to the current SCBCD for J2EE 1.3 edition, which has only 70 questions working in 2 hours, the Beta exam is really a nightmare.

Back to the content of the exam, this new edition includes many new concepts of EJB 3.0, especially the topics of Java Persistence API and Annotations, which are the core components of EJB 3.0.

The questions are mainly multiple choices, which it will specify clearly whether you should select one, two… four answers. The testing program will warn you if you select more answers than expected. Besides multiple choices, there are also drag and drop questions included, which is not included in the previous version. For drag and drop questions, you will be prompted a new window, confirmed you answer by closing the prompted window. Be careful, the answer will lose if you open this prompted window again, so answer carefully on the first time you handle these questions.

I did a simple statistics on the distribution of question types, some of the questions may include knowledges from more than one question type.

Session Bean (45 out of 180, or 25%)
Message-Driven Bean (19 out of 180, or 11%)
Java Persistance API (70 out of 180, or 39%)
Transaction (36 out of 180, or 20%)
Others (35 out of 180, or 19%)

It is suprisingly to me that Transaction occupies such a big proportion in the exam, which 20% of the questions are related. This may be due to that the use of Transaction can be applied on any Enterprise Bean and Connection Type, also the many variations of transaction types.

Besides, for Session Bean, the major questions are about the use of relevant Annotations for defining the bean type, using dependency injection and constructing references to other session beans.

For Message-Driven Bean, it simply contains the logic on how it works. A few questions also talk about the combined use with Timer Service.

For Java Persistence API, since it’s a new concept to EJB, many fundamental questions will be asked. From the use of annotations to define Entity and Relationships, to the syntax of EJB-QL on querying the database, they all are asked in the exam.

For the remaining part categorized as Others, about one-third of the questions are related to the security issue on the beans, with the use of roles both by annotations or XML descriptors. Other questions include the handling of exceptions, interceptors, etc.

In conclusion, this exam provides a good platform on the new standard EJB 3.0. As the functionalities equipped with EJB 3.0 will greatly helps the development of EJB, I believe this exam must be popular in the coming future. Even I believed I did not do well in today’s exam, I will anyway retake it and get certified after this is officially published.