I am Sun Cer­ti­fied Busi­ness Com­po­nent De­vel­oper!

I am very happy to an­nounce that I passed Sun Cer­ti­fied Busi­ness Com­po­nent De­vel­oper for the Java Plat­form, En­ter­prise Edi­tion 5 (CX-310-091) exam with an as­tound­ing score of 100%!

The exam turned out to be eas­ier than I ex­pected (that is some­what re­flected by my score :D). I was also sur­prised by the fact that there were no drag-and-drop ques­tions — the exam page men­tions about them. Maybe the ques­tions are ran­dom­ized with­out tak­ing the type into ac­count or I sim­ply did it so au­to­mat­i­cally that I didn't even no­ticed.

While prepar­ing to the exam, I an­swered a fair amount of ques­tions from Jav­aBlack­Belt EJB sec­tion and the ones pro­vided as a demo by var­i­ous exam sim­u­la­tors, and I got the im­pres­sion that the exam will test my knowl­edge of both spec­i­fi­ca­tions rather thor­oughly. I've ex­pected ques­tions re­gard­ing e.g. de­clar­a­tive se­cu­rity in con­junc­tion with both in­her­i­tance and XML de­scrip­tors or some twisted JPQL queries. That wasn't the case. Ac­tu­ally, of 61 ques­tions about six were some­what tricky and in­volved re­ally good un­der­stand­ing of the sub­tleties. There were also 4 or 5 that were IMHO am­bigu­ously for­mu­lated, pro­vided ad­di­tional, un­nec­es­sary de­tails in the state­ments or were so ob­vi­ous and un­clear at the same mo­ment that I sit there ru­mi­nat­ing where is the catch. The ma­jor­ity of the ques­tions, which is far than suf­fi­cient to pass the exam, were writ­ten re­ally good and tested in sce­nario-based fash­ion the knowl­edge that I find ab­solutely com­pul­sory for the de­vel­oper to have.

It goes like this: think you know what each trans­ac­tion at­tribute does? Show you un­der­stand the rea­son be­hind their cre­ation, by choos­ing the most ap­pro­pri­ate one for a given real-world sce­nario. This is what you are doing on the job and also my way of learn­ing. I find it a real leap in the terms of exam qual­ity, com­par­ing to Sun Cer­ti­fied Java Pro­gram­mer one. I'm not say­ing I know the way to con­struct a bet­ter exam for this level, but the prob­lems from SCJP seemed very ar­ti­fi­cial to me. I felt like read­ing code of a guy that should be sen­tenced for writ­ing it that way, while being in some sort of cap­tiv­ity my­self, be­cause I haven't got even a com­piler, not to men­tion some code ed­i­tor with syn­tax high­light­ing. That's a night­mare, not an exam.

I heard that new SCJP exam (called SCJP+ as far as I re­mem­ber) is de­signed as a set of short pro­gram­ming tasks in­volv­ing writ­ing a real code. This prob­lem-solv­ing ap­proach is in my opin­ion the best way to build the exams if we want Sun's cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to be highly val­ued in the mar­ket.

My cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is al­ready out­dated as the Java EE 6 came out last week :). Put the (prob­a­ble) two years adop­tion pe­riod aside, there is some­thing to worry about — as de­picted on this page, the fu­ture SCBCD exam is to be split into EJB and JPA spe­cific ones. While I find this move very ra­tio­nal, I am afraid that it will mean that the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion fee will dou­ble. I wish I were wrong.

To sum up, I feel that I've learnt pretty much about Java EE 5 through my prepa­ra­tion for the exam and feel re­ally sat­is­fied, since that was the point of this whole ef­fort. I'm now pretty con­fi­dent of the plat­form's strong and weak points. The broader knowl­edge of the short­com­ings make me lean (lan­guage joke, yeah) to­ward Spring 3.0, as Java EE 6 doesn't seem to re­solve them. I'll write more as soon as I'll get a good grasp of both.