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.

Web Frameworks

I found this free e-book which describes some web development frameworks for Java developers. These frameworks are like those of event driven GUI applications. However they sometimes have steep learning curves. Java provides some web technology. But it does not provide a web application framework. So these third party frameworks have come about to help you with the low level tasks.

Struts is the most well known framework. It is well documented and has a large following. A drawback of using struts are the big configuration files. You need to use a lot of XML markup files for forms and rendering. I hear that developers are moving away from this framework in general.

Java Server Faces (JSF) is another framework. It runs on an application server like WebSphere. It strives to decouple the components and the view. The most frequently used implementation of JSF is Apache's MyFaces. JSF uses a managed bean to store user info. The bean classes contains the logic. This technology is backed by big companies like the former Sun Microsystems. A few years back I did hear that JSF might not be appropriate for mission critical applications. Not sure whether this opinion has since changed yet.