Probably the news has become stale by now. Anyway, Sun is offering free vouchers for the Business Component Developer 5.0 beta exam. As usual, the prerequisite is to be a Sun Certified Programmer.
The important dates to keep in mind are
Exam Dates: December 8, 2006 – January 2, 2007
Registration Starts from November 24, 2006
This is a wonderful opportunity to grab the certification for free. I took my SCBCD,SCWCD,SCMAD certs in this manner. Hope to repeat the same with SCBCD 5.0. Apart from the early adopter advantage, you also get to see a wide variety of questions which definitely helps if you are planning to work on exam preparation books and exam simulators. Here is the Java certification manager’s post from Javaranch.