Java – Important frameworks/tools to learn

frameworksjava

Heyja,

a frequently used answer to the question "What is so special about Java?" is "The tools and frameworks". I guess this is correct. I am stunned when i see all the tools and frameworks which make your life as a developer much easier.

My Java skills are not perfect, but good average, and i am still working on it. I have begun to learn Ant for example and i don't want to miss it. It's awesome. The same with Hibernate. Now i ask myself what i should learn next. I want to gain experience for myself and especially my CV. Unfortunately there are so many of it. And everybody is talking about it, like Spring, Struts, JavaServer Faces, Maven, …

What is widely used in the real world? What tools besides Ant or Subversion/CVS are important? What framework is necessary to learn to be accepted as a "real Java programmer" and to get the interesting jobs? 😉

Best Solution

If we're talking marketability, then you ideally want to be the kind of developer who can be productive at any layer of a production app. So learn something about each layer.

MVC: Struts, Spring MVC.
Data Access: Hibernate, iBatis, JPA.
IOC: Spring (huuuuge for integrating large systems. If you can, learn the AOP principles that Spring is based on)
App Server: Tomcat, JBoss.
Testing: JUnit
Presentation: JSF, JSP.

Also, don't neglect the non-Java technologies you need to know:

SQL - because you will need to talk directly to the database
HTML
JQuery - never underestimate the importance of neat UI features. For most users, that's the only part of what you do that they understand.

If I had to choose one thing out of this list, I'd go for Spring. If choosing two, I'd take Spring and JQuery.

Related Solutions

Java – Why is no one using make for Java

The fundamental issue with Make and Java is that Make works on the premise that you have specify a dependency, and then a rule to resolve that dependency.

With basic C, that typically "to convert a main.c file to a main.o file, run "cc main.c".

You can do that in java, but you quickly learn something.

Mostly that the javac compiler is slow to start up.

The difference between:

javac Main.java
javac This.java
javac That.java
javac Other.java

and

javac Main.java This.java That.java Other.java

is night and day.

Exacerbate that with hundreds of classes, and it just becomes untenable.

Then you combine that with the fact that java tends to be organized as groups of files in directories, vs C and others which tend towards a flatter structure. Make doesn't have much direct support to working with hierarchies of files.

Make also isn't very good at determining what files are out of date, at a collection level.

With Ant, it will go through and sum up all of the files that are out of date, and then compile them in one go. Make will simply call the java compiler on each individual file. Having make NOT do this requires enough external tooling to really show that Make is not quite up to the task.

That's why alternatives like Ant and Maven rose up.

Xcode – How to “add existing frameworks” in Xcode 4

As per Apple's documentation:

In the project navigator, select your project.
Select your target.
Select the "Build Phases" tab.
Open "Link Binaries With Libraries" expander.
Click the + button.
Select your framework.
(optional) Drag and drop the added framework to the "Frameworks" group.

Best Solution

Related Solutions

Java – Why is no one using make for Java

Xcode – How to “add existing frameworks” in Xcode 4

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