Alexey Yudichev

I’ve passed another Sun Java exam today – Sun Certified Web Component Developer for J2EE 1.4 (310-081). The total score was 78% which is 54 correct answers out of 69. The pass mark is 62%. I’ve spent approximately 4 evenings and around 8 hours during a day for preparation. I used same “real exams” downloaded from Examcollection but this time they were real crap – about 2/3 of all questions were not relevant to the exam but instead were taken from some basic Java language exam. Don’t look at these – 319-081 is purely about Servlet/JSP technologies!

The following documents cover the 91% of the subject: Java Servlet 2.4 Specification and JavaServer Pages Specification 2.0. I say 91% because there is a specific topic – J2EE Design Patterns – which is not covered by the specs. You have to obtain Sun’s book on J2EE Design Patterns and read the brief description on what each pattern does. Most of pattern questions offer a specific design problem and ask you to pick the design patterns that would help to solve the problem.

Below are several advice to some of you who are going to take the exam in the nearest future (I know some of you do).

• Read these two specs or an equivalent book from beginning till the end and pay attention to syntax. More than a half of questions are tied to the specific syntax (not even semantics!). For example, the set of possible attributes of <jsp:useBean>.
• If you are familiar and experienced with Servlet 2.3/JSP 1.2 don’t relax – quite often questions are tricky in a sense that they can be treated differently if applied against older spec.
• Read the entire spec – I found the questions quite diverse and covering pretty much everything even including one question about tag files . There were several about packaging like where you would expect TLD files to be located (I got puzzled by this one as I didn’t read about it). Don’t ignore security and security-related syntax in web.xml.

Here is my score breakdown:

Well… who cares about Standard Actions (jsp:) when there’s JSTL? Also clearly I overestimated the value of Custom Tags as I read it three times in a row – hence 100%. I am really surprised I got 60% on EL – I was sure I answered them all correctly. Other than that the results are pretty much what I’d expect after spending so little time preparing.