I'm unable to afford a Company Learning Pass to access Oracle-provided MyLearn materials to prepare for the NetSuite Web Services Certification, So I'm taking the approach of reading all the documentation (and building projects to implement and understand it) about SuiteTalk in the NetSuite Help files. Navigating the documentation in a depth-first manner (which will land you at "Philosophy" every time if you do it in Wikipedia), I arrived at an article at SuiteTalk Web Services / SuiteTalk SOAP Web Services Platform Overview / Soap Web Services Setup / SOAP Web Services Quick Start / Building and Application with Java using Apache Axis. It turns out that for me at least, this is anything BUT a "quick" start. At this URL: NetSuite Applications Suite I have installed the JDK, unzipped the "Ant" thing, and the "Axis" thing, and now I'm at Step 4. "Configure Java to generate unreferenced types." It gives a snippet:

<axis-wsdl2java timeout="360000" output="${generated.src.dir}" verbose="true" 
      url="${wsdl-1.3.url}" all="true" wrapArrays="true">

But I guess I'm supposed to already understand where that goes. I saw lots of build.xml files in the "samples" folder, but I don't think it was talking about any of those, so maybe it meant the ant-build.xml file? A WinGrep over the various things downloaded for this "quick"-start found ant-build.xml matching that "axis-wsdl2java" in one place. But I can't tell if I'm supposed to add that snippet somewhere (and where to add it) or change the existing one to have those attributes. Looks like I'm in way over my head. Can I properly learn this stuff without learning all about Java app development first? It seems it would only make me a better developer, but I wonder if I'm starting from the wrong end of the elephant.

I think you're over thinking it... it just wants this piece added

@Aaron McCausland follow the study guide.

@Anthony OConnor That's a fair point, although my goal in passing the test is not just to pass it, it's to learn enough to be confident enough that when a potential employer asks how well I know SuiteTalk, I can say that I know it very well. At this point I've done almost nothing with it but companies keep asking for it because they want to integrate their other systems with NetSuite that way. But... I probably am overthinking it.

Yes, that's the one @Aaron McCausland

OK. Just in case I come back to it later, I changed

<target name="w2j-simplebean" depends="j2w-simplebean">
			<axis-wsdl2java output="${build.dir}/java" testcase="true" url="./simplebean.wsdl"> 
				<mapping namespace="<http://localhost:8080/axis/services/SimpleBean>" package="com.test.simplebean"/>
			</axis-wsdl2java> 
	</target>

to

<target name="w2j-simplebean" depends="j2w-simplebean">
			<axis-wsdl2java output="${build.dir}/java" testcase="true" url="./simplebean.wsdl" all="true"> 
				<mapping namespace="<http://localhost:8080/axis/services/SimpleBean>" package="com.test.simplebean"/>
			</axis-wsdl2java> 
	</target>

Even though it only resembles the example in the quickstart guide (has no wrapArrays or timeout attribute, for example).

you can have multiple JDKs installed at the same time. Also I'd argue your issues here are apache axis knowledge more than NetSuite. i..e general SOAP web services knowledge which I don't think many netsuite devs know much about these days.

Yeah if anything can be done via REST I tend to go that direction. But a lot of companies are still asking for someone who can do SuiteTalk SOAP WebServices stuff.

Yes, it is true the the default JDK can be only one at a time. i.e. if you type in

java

it has to resolve to a single executable of a particular version.