What to learn for making Java web applications in

Question

My goal is to make web applications!

I finished reading the Books "Headfirst - Java" and "Headfirst - Servlets and JSP".

Because this topic (web applications) is so big and complicated, I would like to ask what I should learn next. I feel overstrained when I read catchwords like Java EE, EJB, JSF, JPA, Glassfish ... but I won't give up.

Can anyone please tell me how I should proceed with learning? Should I grab a book like this: Beginning Java EE 6 Platform with GlassFish 3: From Novice to Professional or should I just make some Online tutorials?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Even if I know that this will be controversial, my advice would be to start with Java EE 6 only. So, grab GlasshFish v3 and either get the book Beginning Java EE 6 Platform with GlassFish 3: From Novice to Professional or follow the Java EE 6 tutorial. In my opinion, the book (that I've started to read so I know what I'm talking about) provides more guidance which might be preferable if "everything" is new for you (it covers both the Java EE platform and its APIs and the environment to build, deploy your applications).

Now, as I said, I can already hear voices saying things like "Java EE is heavy, use Spring instead, learn Struts or Wicket or Stripes for the presentation layer, learn Hibernate for persistence, or not because I don't like ORM, use iBatis or straight JDBC instead (you'll see, it's cool with Spring, Spring is so cooool), and use Tomcat (and why not Jetty), or JBoss, or just forget all this and go for Grails, and bla bla bla...".

But I don't think that this is really helping you and, without mentoring or guidance (and you won't find a non outdated unique resource covering all combinations), this must sound very confusing for a beginner.

So, because I think that Java EE 6 is a big improvement over previous versions of Java EE, because it provides really nice standard APIs for all your needs (Servlet 3.0, JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1 lite, Bean Validation 1.0, CDI, etc), because these APIs are all more than decent, because there is nothing really wrong in learning them, because this is already a big task, because you have to start somewhere, I'd focus on Java EE 6 only and forget the other frameworks for now. More precisely, I'd start with the Java EE 6 Web Profile (and then add things if you want to go further).

By doing this, 1) you'll get started and you'll learn brand new things and 2) you'll give some time to all other frameworks and/or tools to adapt and prove that there is still a need for them. And if there is, it will still be time to experiment the survivors and you'll be able to understand much better why they exist.