Java in the working world...

[Joe Bob Anonymous]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in the direction
of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want you to have
experience in the later? I figured my experience in Java in general might give me an
edge in the learning curve... but I wanna ask the community out here. How hard would
it be for me to tune my skills in the J2EE direction?? Am I just in an odd situation
where I haven't had to use such things yet??

 

[Sudsy]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace
utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in
the direction
of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want
you to have
experience in the later? I figured my experience in Java in general
might give me an
edge in the learning curve... but I wanna ask the community out here.
How hard would
it be for me to tune my skills in the J2EE direction?? Am I just in an
odd situation
where I haven't had to use such things yet??

I don't think it's unusual that you haven't had exposure to EJBs.
Based on my own experience, only big companies (and surprisingly
few at that) seem to have taken on the J2EE challenge. It's a
shame, IMHO, as this is an elegant platform for mission-critical
apps.
But then I've seen more jobs listed in the past two weeks than
I've seen in months. Perhaps the climate is thawing? That would
be very nice news and long in coming. Perhaps companies have
finally figured out that you can't stay in maintenance mode
forever.
If you wanted to get some practice on your own then you could
download a J2EE server from either Sun or IBM. The WebSphere
AppServer can be had on a six month trial basis for free. It's
fun (seriously!) even if you don't have a real-world app to
deliver.

 

[Ken Ream]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in the direction
of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want you to have
experience in the later? I figured my experience in Java in general might give me an
edge in the learning curve... but I wanna ask the community out here. How hard would
it be for me to tune my skills in the J2EE direction?? Am I just in an odd situation
where I haven't had to use such things yet??

It helps if you understand http. But you should haven't much problems.
Not odd, I've seen plenty of jobs where they wanted Swing experience.
Every company has different needs.

 

[Miguel De Anda]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in the direction
of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want you to have
experience in the later? I figured my experience in Java in general might give me an
edge in the learning curve... but I wanna ask the community out here. How hard would
it be for me to tune my skills in the J2EE direction?? Am I just in an odd situation
where I haven't had to use such things yet??

Install tomcat or something and play with it at home in your spare time.

 

[Wendy S]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace
utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in the
direction of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.
Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want
you to have experience in the later?

I haven't been job hunting lately, but I've been using JSP & Servlets
(Struts/JSTL/Tomcat) exclusively and NOT the things in your first list!

No EJB's though. I read about them, asked around, and discovered that for
our little app, they would most likely be overkill.

 

[Ramon F Herrera]

I have concerns similar to those of Joe Bob. I began writing
simple Swing applications, then added client JDBC, wrote a large
app and most recently some applets. Now I find myself limited by
the kinds of issues that made RMI, JNI and servlets necessary.

So, what's next? Should I learn RMI and JNI now or should
I go straight to servlets? I have the vague impression that
the newfangled servlet replaced the older RMI and JNI?

TIA,

-Ramon

 

[Tim Jowers]

So, what's next? Should I learn RMI and JNI now or should
I go straight to servlets? I have the vague impression that
the newfangled servlet replaced the older RMI and JNI?

TIA,

-Ramon

Maybe you should start by looking at the MVC design pattern. And you
maybe can skip a few steps by looking at Web Services rather than
servlets if you want. Maybe that will be the next hot topic as it
allows code to be written in .NET or J2EE and work together. As
always, the sun tutorials are a good place to start.
Tim

 

[Daniel Dyer]

I haven't been job hunting lately, but I've been using JSP & Servlets
(Struts/JSTL/Tomcat) exclusively and NOT the things in your first list!

No EJB's though. I read about them, asked around, and discovered that
for our little app, they would most likely be overkill.

You're right, EJBs are overkill in many situations. While EJBs have many
obvious advantages, often they are used because some programmer wants to
try something new and get the latest buzzword on his/her CV. The most
important thing to learn about EJBs is when not to use them. That's not to
say that EJBs are not useful in the right situations, but they're not a
silver bullet.

Dan.

 

[ninhoa]

I have concerns similar to those of Joe Bob. I began writing
simple Swing applications, then added client JDBC, wrote a large
app and most recently some applets. Now I find myself limited by
the kinds of issues that made RMI, JNI and servlets necessary.

So, what's next? Should I learn RMI and JNI now or should
I go straight to servlets? I have the vague impression that
the newfangled servlet replaced the older RMI and JNI?

TIA,

-Ramon

Download tomcat and learn servlets/jsp's (and maybe struts)

 

[Joona I Palaste]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace utilizing things
like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet used anything in the direction
of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

Is it just me or does it seem like all jobs being offered out there want you to have
experience in the later? I figured my experience in Java in general might give me an
edge in the learning curve... but I wanna ask the community out here. How hard would
it be for me to tune my skills in the J2EE direction?? Am I just in an odd situation
where I haven't had to use such things yet??

Servlets are pretty much crucial in my line of Java programming work.
We are developing an in-house monitoring system for our customer, which
will be working via a web browser interface. On the side of our
software, the communication with the user is implemented with Servlets.
We also use JSPs for some parts of the user interface. On the opposite
end, the system communicates with the customer's database using JDBC.
On the other hand, we don't use any of the other technologies you
mention - RMI, JNI, EJB or even Swing.

--
/-- Joona Palaste ([email protected]) ---------------------------\
| Kingpriest of "The Flying Lemon Tree" G++ FR FW+ M- #108 D+ ADA N+++|
| http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste W++ B OP+ |
\----------------------------------------- Finland rules! ------------/
"Life without ostriches is like coffee with milk."
- Mika P. Nieminen

 

[Juha Laiho]

So, I've spent the last five or so years using Java at my workplace
utilizing things like RMI, JNI, JDBC and Swing. However, I've not yet
used anything in the direction of JSPs, Servlets or EJBs.

As for going towards J2EE, your experience with RMI and JDBC should
help. As at least I don't see J2EE things very tied to the HW/OS
platform you're running on, JNI wouldn't be of much use (if my brain
connects this correctly: Java Native Interface). Swing experience
might be good, as it's also possible to have Swing-based clients to
a J2EE application.

EJBs should not be too hard for you; they build on calling things
remotely and using JDBC.

Servlets as such are not a hard concept, but there it's advantageous
(or, I'd say necessary) to somewhat understand the operation (and
limitations) of HTTP protocol. There you most possibly also need
some knowledge of HTML.

Then JSPs. They require good knowledge of HTML, and similar
understanding of HTTP protocol issues as servlets do. I'd consider
the border between servlets and JSP such that servlets are used
where the content plays a greater role than the presentation,
and JSP where the presentation is the prime factor (of course
also puling in the content).

In practice, JSP pages are first translated (compiled?) to servlets,
so they very strongly share the same issues, but the programmers point
of view is very different between the two.


And adding my voice to those that say that J2EE seems to be a great
tool, but requires a huge project and very skilled architect to be of
any benefit.

I don't have practical experience in J2EE, but my hunch is that if what
you're building is a single conceptual entity, built by a team of ten
developers, then the project is too small for J2EE. If what you're
building is a collection of multiple separate but interacting bodies
of software, built by several distinct teams, then J2EE could have
an edge - if you have the capable architect.

So, I see J2EE more bound to the development organisation than the
actual size of the resulting software. But then, as the size of the
software has effect on the development organisation, there's an indirect
connection.

 

[Rasputin]

I have concerns similar to those of Joe Bob. I began writing
simple Swing applications, then added client JDBC, wrote a large
app and most recently some applets. Now I find myself limited by
the kinds of issues that made RMI, JNI and servlets necessary.

So, what's next? Should I learn RMI and JNI now or should
I go straight to servlets? I have the vague impression that
the newfangled servlet replaced the older RMI and JNI?

Do you mean JNI or Jini? I'd guess the latter.
No employers seem to have heard of it, but it does make RMI much more
powerful. For ease of use, I'd go for EJB.
Get a server from http://www.jboss.org
and have a play, it's free.

 

[Michael Young]

I disagree, it's most EJB servers that are overkill! I mean there is
nothing simpler than a stateless session bean, three methods to worry
about, how hard is that? I go to clients sites all the time and see
people avoiding EJBs like the plague only to end up creating something
nearly identcial with find methods and everything. I was at a client
site *last* week that had their own nearly identical thing, it was
causing 300 connections to the database and thrashed through "data
objects" like crazy -- and this was to build a *menu* at the top of
the page!!!

All this was done because "EJB is too much for our small app." So
fine, use Tomcat/OpenEJB if you need quick and simple. I like OpenEJB
as it has the simplest config I've ever seen in an EJB or Serlvet
container and it's *built* to be small, embeddible, and lightweight.
It doesn't bombard you with crap you don't need. If you someday have
a hundred thousand requests per minute and need a clustered server,
then just move to one of the big, bulky guys like Jboss, Weblogic, or
WebSphere.

EJB is not overkill, as a Sun API it has less interfaces than even
JDBC, it's the implementations that overkill it! Don't blame EJB
because you chose to use WebSphere for running your hello world app.
It's not EJB's fault WebSphere has a few hundred meg memory footprint
on startup. Use EJB, just pick a server that fits your needs.