Oh, yeah. I’m now a Sun Certified Programmer. 🙂
I can understand why some people complain about the certification, it really is a bunch of things you don’t use much in your daily work. But it is also details that any Java programmer should really know about the language. I found the parts about string handling, collections and threads to be the most relavant ones and something I should have learnt properly a long time ago. 🙂
Keith Donald explains Spring without the buzzwords here.
Ted Neward has a post on the SOA hype here.
As with all technologies it is important to evaluate and make an educated decision about wether to use it. In my daily work i se very few usages where SOA will be a valid choice. Defining open, interoperable services isn’t worth it if all you are looking for is remoting. If you need to make your service available to a multitude of platforms and clients it makes sense, but many try to do this believing that there might be multiple clients in the future. And of course there is also the question of what interfaces to define. As Neward points out, looking at SOA as just session beans with brackets is not enough.