VMware Spring Professional
Spring Certified Professional
Pivotal Spring Professional v5.0
Summary
- Foreword
- Pivotal Spring Professional v5.0 has a new official name
- Beware of outdated mock-exams(dumps)
- General information on certification
- The purpose of certification
- Exam Topics
- The headache with this exam
- My first tips for preparing the certification exam
- How to Prepare for the Certification with 100% Success Guarantee
- 9 Mocks exams(450 questions)
- You must give more importance to these topics
Foreword
After I had the opportunity to take and successfully pass the VMware Spring Professional certification exam a while ago, I would like, through this article, to share some tips and strategies to help you nail your certification exam. So get ready !
Pivotal Spring Professional v5.0 has a new official name
Since the acquisition of Pivotal by VMware; The official name of the certification was updated in 2020 and is called today VMware Spring Professional. The examen code is EDU-1202: Spring Certified Professional.
The official Le study guide was also updated in October 2020.
Beware of outdated mock-exams(dumps)
When I was preparing for my certification, I bought 8 exam dumps, which make a total of 400 questions (50 questions/exam). From all these questions, in addition to the ones I reviewed in books, I only found one question in the real exam. So don’t waste your money and keep in mind that the questions are updated all the time and vary from an exam to another. This definitly gives the Spring certification its credibility.
General information on certification
| Type of exam | Computer based exam(Pearson VUE), multiple questions |
| Voucher price | 253,20 $ TTC |
| Number of questions | 50 Questions |
| Types of questions | Multiple choice with only one correct answer Multiple choice with 2 correct answers Multiple choice without specifying the number of correct answers |
| Duration of exam | 95 Minutes |
| Score to pass | 76% (38 Questions) |
| Voucher validity | 1 year |
| Rescheduling policy | You can postpone or advance it as much as you want, even 1 hour before the exam time. |
| Spring Version | Latest stable (today 5.3.1) |
The purpose of certification
The Spring Professional Certification Exam is designed to test and validate understanding as well as familiarity with key aspects of Spring and Spring Boot such as:
- Configuration, Component-scanning, AOP
- Data access and Transactions
- REST, Spring Security
- Auto-configuration, Actuator, Spring Boot Testing
Exam Topics
- Container (20%)
- AOP (8%)
- JDBC (4%)
- Transactions (8%)
- MVC (8%)
- Security (6%)
- REST (6%)
- JPA Spring Data (4%)
- Testing (4%)
- Boot Into (8%)
- Boot Autoconfig (8%)
- Boot Actuator (8%)
- Boot Testing (8%)
Bref d’examen officiel: Pivotal_ExamBrief_SpringProfessional.pdf
Study Guide officiel: Spring-Professional-Certification-Study-Guide.pdf
The headache with this exam
- The exam contains several questions with multiple answers, without knowing precisely the number of correct answers, hence the difficulty of this Test.
- The time constraint.
- The answers contain terms that are very similar and may be misleading. You have to read the question several times.
- Shades of meaning between words in the suggested answers, for example:
- @Secured or @Secure
- @RolesAllowed or @AllowedRoles
- @Import or @Imports
- datasource.setDriverClassName or datasource.setDriverClass
- datasource.setConnectionURL or datasource.setUrl
- password-encoded or encoded-password
- TransactionTemplate, TransactionManager, TransactionInterceptor, PlateformTransactionManager
My first tips for preparing the certification exam
- You must first put aside the preparation methods for Spring Core and Web certification for version 3 and 4, because it is very different and it is not the same thing!
- Don’t buy mock certification exams from some sites, even if they promise 100% success, and that they will refund you if you fail. Beware of these sites and especially do not believe in the comments which are mostly false and robot-generated. Note that the questions sold (www.certification-questions.com) are identical to those of the Spring version 4 exams, which you can find for free on any site.
- If you happen to buy practice exams, keep in mind that none of these questions will fall back into the real exam. However, it can still help you practice and familiarize yourself with the exam. Here are some pretty credible resources:
- You should never prepare for a Certification exam in a rush. Give yourself the necessary time to prepare and assimilate all the concepts. Otherwise, they will be confused and you may fail your exam.
- A certification is worth absolutely nothing if you don’t understand every detail of the certification. A certification is only a mean to challenge yourself, but the aim is to master a technology very well and not just have a false paper.
- Always do your own summary, this is important for you afterwards and not just for certification. One can quickly forget with the panoply of technical words, and you will certainly need them someday during an interview. If it’s not for you, at least do it for an apprentice or a colleague.
How to Prepare for the Certification with 100% Success Guarantee
Preparation methods by level
Today, I have about 30 Certifications in the IT field. I started getting certified at the age of 21 and have given more than 50 certified trainings. With all this hindsight, I have my own method of preparing for certification or helping someone get it.
Level assessment
The method of preparation depends on the level of experience and familiarity with the technology. Here is a little quiz to test your level
Quiz:
A) What is the order of the following filters?
- ExceptionTranslationFilter
- UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter
- BasicAuthenticationFilter
- AbstractSecurityInterceptor
B) What is the order of the following filters?
- DelegatingFilterProxy
- FilterChainProxy
- SecurityFilterChain
- javax.servlet.Filter
C) What is the difference between?
- AntPathRequestMatcher
- MvcRequestMatcher
D) Which one can accept a SpEL expression?
- @Secured
- @PreAuthorize
- @RolesAllowed
E) What kind of proxy does a Singleton Bean use?
- CGLIB
- JDK Proxy
F) In a transaction; What is the order of the level of isolation, from the strictest to the least strict
- Serialization
- Rep Reads
- Write Uncommited
- Commited
Assessments
- If you don’t even know that these keywords exist in Spring, you have a Junior Level.
- If you have tried or answered 1 or 2 questions but you did not understand the questions or you feel like you have seen them before, you have a Confirmed Level.
- If you have answered 2 or more questions and you have a little doubt to answer all the questions, you have a Senior Level.
- If you were able to answer 4 questions, you have an Expert Level.
Preparation for certification
| Level | Preparation tools | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| All levels | Book Resume: Core Spring 5 Certification in Detail de Ivan Krizsan Price: 4,49 € Total pages: 224 A5 pages, 100 in A4 format. This summary is just excellent, you will have no more ambiguity.  | Read it carefully 4 times |
| All levels | 9 mocks exams https://www.ad-satour.com/information-technology/mock-exams/vmware-spring-professional-2020-2021-9-free-mock-exams-with-answers | |
| All levels | During preparation, do your own summary at evernote.com or notion.so | |
| All levels | Always search on baeldung.com this site for a better understanding, read carefully the codes examples given for each topic(Isolation, Transaction, AOP, etc) | 20 heures |
| Junior Confirmed Senior | A Code certification cannot be prepared with a book. It’s not ITIL, Scrum or PMP. TheVMware Spring Professional is a technical certification that you have to practice very well. Luckily, we have a book for that: Pivotal Certified Professional Core Spring 5 Developer Exam: A Study Guide Using Spring Framework 5 by Iuliana Cosmina Publisher: Apress Release Date: December 2019 ISBN: 9781484251362  This book comes with a passable code. Every detail in this book is provided with a code and a corrected TP. To get an idea on the codes: https://github.com/Apress/pivotal-certified-pro-spring-dev-exam-02 Read the book for free on https://learning.oreilly.com/ for 10 day trial. PLEASE NOTE: This book has a first version aims to prepare for Spring 4 Certification(with old XML habits). Believe me, it’s useless, and will not help you:  | 120 heures One reading is sufficient. Except for: the Junior Level who must read the book twice. And practice all exercices |
| All levels | Give more importance to the following topics: AOP(Advice, Poincut et Aspects…) Proxy(JDK Proxy ou CGLIB) Beans Life cycle (DisposableBean, PreDestroy…) Transaction(Isolation, Propagation, Transaction declarative or with programmation….) JPA (Transaction Management, Delegation Management, JTA Strategy |
9 Mocks exams(450 questions)
you must give more importance to these topics
| Topic | Subjects to review |
|---|---|
| Container | The LifeCycle of application-context , beansAnnotationConfigApplication, ContextFileSystemXmlApplication, ContextBean, FactoryPostProcessor, BeanPostProcessor, ContextLoaderListener, AbstractDispatcher, ServletInitializer, @ContextConfiguration, @RunWith(SpringRunner.class), @SpringJUnitConfig, registerShutdownHook, Bean Scopes, @Component, @Autowired, @ComponentScan, @Qualifier, @Configuration, @Lazy, @Profile, @PropertySource, ProperySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer, @PreDestroy, @PostConstruct, JSR-250, Java Config, @Bean, @Value(“#$@”), SpEL, StandardServletEnvironment. |
| AOP | Cross cutting concern, Pointcut, join point, advice, aspect, weaving, JDK dynamic proxies, CGLIB proxies, @Before, @AfterReturning, @After, @Around, @EnableAspectJAutoProxy, execution(*, within(, ProceedingJoinPoint. |
| MVC | MVC Design Pattern, DispatcherServlet, web application context vs ApplicationContextSpring, bean scopes, default scope, @Controller, @RequestMapping, @RequestParam, @PathVariable, Controller. |
| REST | ResourceHTTP verbs : POST, GET, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, REST Secure, HTTP Method Idempotent, interoperableHttpMessageConverter, stateless, @RestController, @RequestMapping, @ResponseBody, @ResponseStatusspring-boot-starter-web, RestTemplate. |
| Spring BOOT | @SpringBootApplication, spring-boot-starter-parent, spring-boot-devtools, @Configuration, @ConfigurationProperties, Automatic configuration, @Conditional OnClass, @Conditional OnWebApplication, application.properties ,YAML, @SpringBootApplication, @EnableAutoConfiguration, @EntityScan, @SpringBootConfiguration, @LocalServerPort, @SpringBootTest, @WebMvcTestJetty |
| Security | Authentication, Authorization, Cross-Cutting Concern, Spring Security, Web Infrastructure, DelegatingFilterProxy, FilterChainProxy, SecurityFilterChain, SecurityContext, GrantedAuthority, UserDetails, UserDetailsService, Request Matcher, antMatcher vs mvcMatcher, Password Hashing, Salting, @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity, @PreAuthorized and @RolesAllowed, JSR-250 |
| JDBC | DataSource, JndiDataSourceLookup, JdbcTemplatecallback : ResultSetExtractor, RowCallbackHandler, RowMapper, batchUpdate, execute, query, queryForList, queryForMap, queryForObject, queryForRowSet, update. |
| Transactions | @Transactional, local and a global transaction, JTA, isolation level, noRollbackFor, noRollbackForClassName, propagation, readOnly, rollbackFor, PlatformTransactionManager, @EnableTransactionManagement, declarative transaction management. |
| JPA Spring Data | DataSource, EmbeddedDatabase, spring.datasource.jndi-name, PlatformTransactionManager, ORM, PersistenceContext, EntityManager, @Entity, Spring Data repository, @EnableJpaRepositories, find(First[count])By[property expression][@Query, find|read|get|query|stream, delete|remove. |
| Testing | Unit Test, Integration Test, JUnit, JUnit 5 Jupiter,@SpringJunitConfig, @Transactional, @ContextConfiguration, Mockito, EasyMock, @DataJpaTest, @WebMvcTest, @SpringBootTest, @SpringBootConfiguration. |
I wish you good luck!
5 Comments
Abdelkarim chinbou
30 November 2020 at 9h13Thank you si abdelahad 👍
Hello ~
30 November 2020 at 10h10You’re most welcome!
Alirizan
4 December 2020 at 18h09A huge work thank you
Razan
15 December 2020 at 0h49Congratulations
Rafał Borowiec
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