EJB 2 - Basic

This EJB exam requires the ability to program, deploy and call simple session beans. It's required to distinguish the general purpose of all bean types. EJB v3 is such different technology that it will be covered in other exams. We could have included entity beans but they are on the way to be replaced with an alternative persistence standard (EJB 3). Entity beans would be part of an EJB v2 Intermed exam (and are part of the SCBCD certification). This exam includes no details about message driven beans or entity beans, no transactions, no security and no exception notion. We focus on the distributed computing aspect, with session beans.

To make it simple, these objectives are an easier subset of these SCBCD objectives (http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/CX-310-090.xml):

Client View of a Session Bean
Session Bean Component Contract
Session Bean Lifecycle

To make your study even easier, this exam matches what is taught in the chapters 3 and 4 of Mastering EJB (3rd ed) freely available at TheServerSide.com (http://www.theserverside.com/books/wiley/masteringEJB/index.tss)

	Released	Beta	Frozen
General 3 questions Describe these types of beans (Session (both Stateful and Stateless), Entity) and their general purpose. Explain the concept of the EJB Container and deployment. Describe how the bean developer provides home and remote interfaces and an implementation class. And, how the container provides/creates the implementation for these interfaces and remote stubs/skeletons. Explain the concept and purpose of the home interface, remote interface and component.	8	189	17	Add a question Beta questions
Distribution 1 question Explain the transparent distributed nature of an EJB having a client-side stub and a server-side skeleton. Describe differences between remote and local interfaces.	1	12	4	Add a question Beta questions
Interfaces/Classes 3 questions Know the classes and interface that a session bean must inherit/implement and their relationships: Serializable, EnterpriseBean, SessionBean, Remote, EJBObject, EJBLocalObject, EJBHome, EJBLocalHome.	5	69	16	Add a question Beta questions
Client View 1 question Look-up a home stub and create a bean from it. How JNDI works is not part of this exam.	2	28	5	Add a question Beta questions
State 1 question Explain the difference between a Stateless and a Stateful Session bean, and the notion of conversational state. Stateless beans must not have any parameters (in contrast to Stateful Session beans, for state initialization). Give examples/questions to test when ejbActivate/ejbPassivate are called.	2	30	8	Add a question Beta questions
Instance Pooling and Lifecycle 3 questions Explain why the EJB Container uses multiple bean instances (on thread max per instance) and why it pools these instances. Give examples/questions to test the passivation/activation process and which type of Session bean it affects. Explain why the state of stateful session beans must be Serializable. Give examples/questions to test when the ejbCreate, ejbRemove, setSessionContext are called.	2	46	20	Add a question Beta questions
Deployment Descriptor 2 questions Give examples/questions to test the usage of the different XML elements needed to deploy a simple Session bean. Explain key characteristics of the file name, ejb-jar.xml.	1	25	13	Add a question Beta questions
Packaging (Ejb-jar) 1 question Give examples/questions to test knowledge on the general structure of the ejb-jar file, including the location of the deployment descriptor.	1	9	9	Add a question Beta questions