Cleared SCEA Part 1 Exam

March 31st 2006: I cleared the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect exam. I was planning to take up this exam from some time, and in the last 3 days I really put some effort and passed the exam with good scores.

I have scored 100% in many of the following objectives, especially the ones that I am passionate about like Design patterns, EJB, Applicability of J2EE, Legacy Connectivity(even though I dont like this subject I know a bit), protocols, messaging.

Exam Objectives

Section 1: Concepts
* Draw UML Diagrams
* Interpret UML diagrams.
* State the effect of encapsulation, inheritance, and use of interfaces on architectural characteristics.

Section 2: Common Architectures
* Recognize the effect on each of the following characteristics of two tier, three tier and multi-tier architectures: scalability maintainability, reliability, availability, extensibility, performance, manageability, and security.
* Recognize the effect of each of the following characteristics on J2EE technology: scalability maintainability, reliability, availability, extensibility, performance, manageability, and security.
* Given an architecture described in terms of network layout, list benefits and potential weaknesses associated with it.

Section 3: Legacy Connectivity
* Distinguish appropriate from inappropriate techniques for providing access to a legacy system from Java code given an outline description of that legacy system

Section 4: Enterprise JavaBeans Technology
* List the required classes/interfaces that must be provided for an EJB technology.
* Distinguish stateful and stateless Session beans.
* Distinguish Session and Entity beans.
* Recognize appropriate uses for Entity, Stateful Session, and Stateless Session beans.
* State benefits and costs of Container Managed Persistence.
* State the transactional behavior in a given scenario for an enterprise bean method with a specified transactional deployment descriptor.
* Given a requirement specification detailing security and flexibility needs, identify architectures that would fulfill those requirements.
* Identify costs and benefits of using an intermediate data-access object between an entity bean and the data resource.

Section 5: Enterprise JavaBeans Container Model
* State the benefits of bean pooling in an EJB container.
* State the benefits of Passivation in an EJB container.
* State the benefit of monitoring of resources in an EJB container.
* Explain how the EJB container does lifecycle management and has the capability to increase scalability.

Section 6: Protocols
* Given a scenario description, distinguish appropriate from inappropriate protocols to implement that scenario.
* Identify a protocol, given a list of some of its features, where the protocol is one of the following: HTTP, HTTPS, IIOP, JRMP.
* Select from a list, common firewall features that might interfere with the normal operation of a given protocol.

Section 7: Applicability of J2EE Technology
* Select from a list those application aspects that are suited to implementation using J2EE.
* Select from a list those application aspects that are suited to implementation using EJB.
* Identify suitable J2EE technologies for the implementation of specified application aspects.

Section 8: Design Patterns
* From a list, select the most appropriate design pattern for a given scenario. Patterns will be limited to those documented in Gamma et al. and named using the names given in that book.
* State the benefits of using design patterns.
* State the name of a design pattern (for example, Gamma) given the UML diagram and/or a brief description of the pattern's functionality.
* Select from a list benefits of a specified design pattern (for example, Gamma).
* Identify the design pattern associated with a specified J2EE feature

Section 9: Messaging
* Identify scenarios that are appropriate to implementation using messaging, EJB, or both.
* List benefits of synchronous and asynchronous messaging.
* Select scenarios from a list that are appropriate to implementation using synchronous and asynchronous messaging.

Section 10: Internationalization
* State three aspects of any application that might need to be varied or customized in different deployment locales.
* Match the following features of the Java 2 platform with descriptions of their functionality, purpose or typical uses: Properties, Locale, ResourceBundle, Unicode, java.text package, InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter.

Section 11: Security
* Select from a list security restrictions that Java 2 environments normally impose on applets running in a browser.
* Given an architectural system specification, identify appropriate locations for implementation of specified security features, and select suitable technologies for implementation of those features.