J2EE Architect Certification Topics
In this next series of posts, I will post tons of articles and notes on Sun’s J2EE architect certification (SCEA). I had taken this exam way back in 2005 . I could not find the study materials until few days back. Now I am posting this stuff and although this might have gone under upgrade, it still could be useful.
The following topic areas are not how Sun breaks it out. Rather, it is how I would break it out in terms of the topics that you need to study. At least 16 out of the 48 questions on the exam when I took it where related to EJBs. There were between 2 and 5 questions on all other topic areas.
| Topic Area | Comments |
| Architecture Concepts and Terms | General stuff like what affects scalability, maintainability, availability. Also, things like HTTP tunneling and screen scrappers. |
| Clustering | You need to know what clustering is in general and what quality attributes (e.g. scalability, maintainability, etc. it affects). I have a general idea what clustering is, but I didn’t read anything on clustering and probably got a question or two wrong as a result. |
| EJBs | |
| Security | Need to know very basic/general terms and concepts about encryption. Also need to understand JDK 1.2 and possibly JDK 1.1 security model. |
| UML | Had 3 or 4 very simple questions about UML notation and terminology. The questions were about class diagram notation and sequence diagram notation. Very basic. You don’t need to read a whole book or even most of a book to get these right. Just review a summary of UML notation such as the front and back pages of the UML Distilled book. |
| Patterns | Very straight forward questions about the purpose of simple patterns such as iterator, singleton and proxy. |
| Internationalization | |
| Protocols | Requires general understanding of SHTML, IIOP, RMI-IIOP. |
| JMS | Very basic questions that had to do with what is JMS good for and the terms such as publish/subscribe, topics, queues, point-to-point, asynchronous. |
| Firewalls/DNS Round-Robin | Need to understand a little bit about firewalls and DNS round-robin relate as well as what might happen in different scenarios involving a client trying to access some resource through a firewall on a given ip address and port number considering what the firewall is configured to allow/disallow and what kind of firewall it is. |
