ask HN: Where to start with J2EE? | Hacker News Reader

ask HN: Where to start with J2EE?

2 pointsebtalley4 comments

Background: I am a business grad who ended up in a technical startup in '05 that introduced me to Python with which I had an immediate love affair with from that point on. I spent years learning good programming patterns through trial and error. Now I have the opportunity to jump feet first into developing full time but with a caveat I have to learn Java. I have always felt that Python did 99% of what I needed to do but hey, you go where the money is. My focus up to now has been data analysis, reporting, and web interfaces using Django, cherrypy, etc.

Current Situation: I'm trying to learn Java like I learned Python. Pick a problem, find a hammer and pound the hell out of it, except I've been falling flat on my face with Java. J2EE is a nightmare. I have tried Spring 3/Roo, Struts, and Tapestry for a solid month with no traction to speak of. Not even business logic yet, all configuration. My current try is to break it down to the bare bones ie: straight servlets and slowly add in components like Hibernate. Most examples seem to start with struts and go from there.

So, What is the best way to quickly bootstrap my way through J2EE? I've been working through an online course @ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~libe50b/ for basic Java. I plan on taking a few courses in the fall at the local U, but I'm looking for something that will make Struts/Spring/Hibernate make sense now.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

/rant back to metadata hell...

"Not even business logic yet, all configuration." - You are doing something wrong then.

With JEE6 you can pretty much start writing code immediately. Without any configuration.

In the most recent Netbeans with Glassfish you can pretty much create a new JEE project and start writing POJOs with business logic, timers or REST endpoints without any configuration except simple annotations.

Netbeans will also auto-reload your code right away on the ap pserver (glassfish) so you can see it in action or debug it immediately.

In the most recent Netbeans with Glassfish you can pretty much create a new JEE project and start writing POJOs

This is good advice, Netbeans with Glassfish as of 6.7 really pulled ahead of the pack when it comes to Java. It just works and you get to coding almost immediately. Little things like standard ant build and deployment scripts being generated for you from the beginning, good junit integration, good source control integration, good issue tracking integration and the one I love the most good JAX-RS tools. I can set up a RESTful services that does crude with JPA in about 5 minutes start to finish it really is as rapid to develop services in Netbeans, as it is to go to ROR or grails or one of the other "fast to develop in languages". As for configuration, almost everything can be done with annotations and honestly any environmental stuff should be done with JNDI. I was really at the I hate Java point (like so many people are) until I switched to Netbeans. I was really worried about Oracle picking it up given they already have an IDE but they seem to be accelerating development of netbeans and the new release 6.9 is testimony to that.

Cut through all the API crap and learn this tutorial, it is all you need for building web-apps:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/caroljmcdonald/archive/2008/07/...

just got hibernate to compile and post for the first time, pretty! :)

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