Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Preparing for SCDJWS

SCDJWS 1.4 is Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services certification exam. I started preparing for this exam after taking the SCJP 5.0 exam earlier in May 2006. This exam covers alot of specifications (XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, WS-I BP 1.0a, J2EE 1.4 for WS 1.1, WSDL 1.1, SOAP 1.1, UDDI 2.0, JAX-RPC 1.1 to name a few). You can see the complete list at Valentin Crettaz's site. There isnt any certification guide available as of this writing for this exam so i followed the advices of people who have already taken this certification exam at JavaRanch SCDJWS Forum and following is my approach to prepare for the exam.

Again, as has become a standard practice for me, i started with a word document where i copy pasted the exam objectives and wrote down the reference material (name of the book and chapters) for each topic on the exam. In summary, following are the resources i am referring:
  • J2EE WebServices by Richard Monson-Haefel (RMH): all chapters + appendices E, F & G. I did not read the F and G from here but referred to MZ's notes for SwA with SAAJ.
  • Sun's Blueprint book - Designing Webservices using J2EE 1.4: whole book
  • Mikalai Zaikin's (MZ) WSD Notes and Quiz You will need to buy the quiz (~95+ questions) from Mikalai. I referred to the Security (chapter 8) and a section on SwA with SAAJ (a section in chapter 2) from MZ's notes. I went through all quiz questions once, a night before the exam.
  • XYZWS.COM - provides a free mock exam (in all 200 questions collection).
  • XSLT and TrAX from Elliot Rusty Harold's (ERH) excellent book Processing XML with Java.
  • Java Webservices Tutorial (WST) for tutorial on JAXB (chapters 1 & 2)

14th Jul 2006 - I am through with all chapters from the RMH book and am mid-way through the Blueprint book. I have to go back to RMH to cover appendices E, F & G which cover SwA, SAAJ with Attachments and JAX-RPC & SwA. I also have to cover the ERH book's XSLT/TrAX, MZ's notes + WS-Security and WST for JAXB/Security. This might take me another week. I plan to complete the syllabus by 21st Jul 2006. After this i will need another week's time to revise my notes and practice more on the code.

I have created some sample programs from RMH's book (on topics like XSD, XML namespaces, JAX-RPC JSE/EJB Endpoints and clients Generated stubs/Dynamic Proxies/DII, JAXR, JAXP DOM/SAX).

I practiced the JAXB samples (first 5 only) as discussed in the WST. The exam does not require one to know

customizing the JAXB bindings so i did not cover those topics. For security, i did not do any programming but just read the concepts from MZ's notes.

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10th Aug, 2006 - I passed the exam (CX-310-220) with 88%. If you need my study notes (305 pages covering whole syllabus completely) the download it here. You can read my final tips to the ranchers on how to prepare at javaranch.com.

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15th Mar, 2007 - I noticed that a few people (infact just 2, one wrote to me a thank you email and another mentioned of referring to my notes at Javaranch forum ) have used my SCDJWS 1.4 notes while preparing for the certification exam. If i could have posted my notes on a personal web site like MZ then probably more people will have been able to use it. Presently the single 305 pages pdf file might seem daunting to many. So setting up a web site is on my list of to-dos.

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