More than 18 months ago I’ve posted my mock exam for Oracle Certified Expert Web Component Developer certification. Until now it’s quite popular and useful (deducting from the comments) for many of you. What I dislike about this exam is that it’s published as a plain WordPress post and it’s rather awful to edit it and it’s not so easy to read as well. So, that’s the aim of my small side project: to create a basic platform for presenting exam questions and their answers.

The whole application is available at the:

exam.piotrnowicki.com

It’s rather micro-sized but I decided to publish the first version without all the whistles-and-blows just to start moving users to get used to it. Therefore, the first version gives you the very basic functionality of questions viewing and on-demand answer showing.

There are also two other reasons I decided to do so.

Firstly, the more features I plan to include in the software the longer the design and implementation phases last and in time it’s harder and harder to finally release the app in the state you accept.

Secondly, I really wanted to get familiar with the JSF 2.x and never really had possibility to do so. I found that this project is a good motivation to learn it. Nevertheless, the JSF / web part of the application is the weakest and a bit dirty/ugly. It is the first candidate to change in the next iterations.

In time, more functionality will be added and the user experience is supposed to rise. If you’re curious

what is planned in the next release, you would like to suggest some enhancements by yourself or like to contribute – take a look at the project’s Github site and the issues tab.

Technically, the application is created using the Java EE 6 (JSF, EL, EJB, CDI, JPA) and deployed on OpenShift’s JBoss AS 7.1 cartridge.

As a side note – the old version of the Mock Exam will still be available but only in form of a PDF located here. This is to encourage users to the new (or rather more precisely – first) version of the exam simulator.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and it’ll help you in your preparations.