JBridge: Java Certification

Web Component Developer - Sample Questions

To be certified or not to be certified

• It costs money to take the exams. Quite a lot of money for the developer exam, which is arguably the most worthwhile.
• The qualifications date and expire. I can accept Sun's point that certification represents your current ability to do a particular job, and current means being abreast of the latest releases. So you can never rest on your laurels.
• Many of the exam questions rely on memory, exercised in a way that is not like your development day job. In the day job, you have IDEs, code-completion tools, compilers, debuggers and pop-up JavaDoc. In the exam, you examine code and have to act as compiler, debugger and documenter yourself. Is this a valuable facility to cultivate?
• You will be exposed you to areas of Java you may will learn for the exam and never use again. For me, bit-wise operators fall into this category. Once mastered, now forgotten.
• In both the programmer and web component exams, many questions expose you to a type of "bad" coding you are unlikely to write yourself. Precedence is a case in point. Of course, to test that a candidate knows that addition takes precedence over bitwise shifting, you might write some complex code mingling the two. In real life, I might spread expressions over several lines or use redundant parentheses to avoid any risk of precendence rule misunderstandings.

• The qualifications take some attaining. Both for the programmer and web component exams, there is a large body of knowledge to master in detail. You can allow yourself to feel good about passing.
• In the "negative" list, I identified memorisation as a redundant skill. That's not how I really feel, though. There are certainly a plethora of tools to help the present-day developer. However, nothing really clears the mental fog better than knowing those keywords or those class libraries. In general, I feel that the effort of memorisation - something I was always suspicious of in the past - actually assists in gaining truer and deeper knowledge.
• The "bad code" question. Should you have to answer questions about bad code? Well, I think (paradoxically) that it's good for you! Far from turning you into a bad coder yourself, bad code actually keeps you on your mettle - you have to know your syntax and methods MORE thoroughly to spot what is going wrong. Bad code also helps you forge opinions about what constitutes good code, as any maintenance programmer worth their salt can tell you.