Acronym Hell

I just saw a massive blog post on developing a web app. Not only was the length of the blog post long, the list of related technologies was large. The post is going to hit JSF, CSS, EJB, DAO, JPA, JAAS, MVC, and MySQL. I have done a little bit of web application development. But I did not recognize all these terms. I guess you got to keep up.

So far I have only checked out the first piece of this blog post. I plan to go through the whole thing. This just seems like a lot to take in to do web programming. Then again this makes web developers more in demand if the skill list is huge.

The question I keep asking myself is whether I want to get into all this. The pain would be that the technologies would become obsolete or replaced just as soon as I master them. Such is life I guess.

Java Enterprise Edition 6

I read an article on the good things coming in Java EE version 6. There is a new API for REST. There is a web profile, meaning you can use a scaled down version of the previously bloated enterprise edition. In the tools department, there is a new version of NetBeans being released.

Enterprise Java Beans has been updated. Things have gotten much simpler with it. The beans are "light". Complexities such as requirements for frameworks are gone. This is in line with the scaled down profile version of the Java EE.

Right now I am still concentrating on learning Java Standard Edition. Some Java friends keep asking me whether I am up to speed on Java EE. It might be time to start learning it. Looks like I will have access to a new updated version, which is actually simpler than previous ones.

Java History

I started learning how to code in Java this year. It is like I arrived very late to the party. I just hope the party is not over. Now it is not like I never heard about Java over the years. I just did not get into it until now.

I read a humorous post that reflected back on Java from the beginnings. There is a lot to the history. However I found many of the milestones were events that I heard about.

Java actually started out as the Oak programming language. The name was switched to Java. The Java 1 developer's conference had a mighty turn out. Version 1.1 of the JDK had JDBC for database connectivity.

Java 2.0 came out. Then there was Enterprise Java beans. I recall the C++ programmers on my project getting excited about EJBs when they first came out. Then the excitement died down. To tell the truth, I don't really know much about EJBs. I assume they are a way to store data you get from the DB.

Web services got hot in the Java world. I also recall the craze where every team on my project wanted to publish some web services. That was short lived though. I saw a metric that 75% of developers used Java back in 2003. I wonder if the number still hold true.

Another metric I spied was that 4.5M developers use Java today. That's a heck of a lot of people. What is the future of Java? I read an article every now and then about problems with Java 7. Time to get familiar with the new Java landscape. Perhaps this party has really only just begun.