“This is my favorite "Hello World" how-to of all time”

I'm no fan of Java EE, but a "hello, world" Rails app would have a similarly complicated walkthrough if "rails new" made you choose which subsystems to include, and the tutorial described what each choice meant. (And if it also covered setting up and configuring the author's editor of choice.)

Just about any software development environmment (including JS in a web browser) is ferociously complex by the standards of, say, the 1980s. The messiness of a "getting started" guide for an app framework has more to do with the quality of the packaging than anything else.

I remember a couple of years back, when I was between jobs, I decided learning Java EE might improve my chances in the job market. I found a PDF book called "The Java EE Tutorial" (originally published by Addison-Wesley, don't remember the author(s)) on Sun's web site and fetched it.

I first was kind of shocked that a book with the word "Tutorial" in the title had about 1100 pages. What really made me walk away, though, was the freaking flow chart that accompanied the book's table of contents, showing how the reader should work his or her way through the book depending on prior knowledge.

There are probably situations where Java EE is the way to go, but those are probably the kind of situations where your application is going to be so huge and complex that the bloat and complexity of Java EE is not going to make much of a difference.

J2EE is a monstrosity, but this also highlights the point that we should stop using Hello World as an example for everything.

Enterprise software is inherently about "big" systems - for some definition of big. Using Hello world as an exemplar only sets up a strawman ripe for ridicule.

That said, the J2EE community does have a somewhat larger commonly known sample app - the Petstore - which ended up being a way to beat up J2EE more or less.

"...we hope that now you have an impression of how to develop Java EE applications in IntelliJ IDEA."

We sure do now!