I'm fairly new to programming and new to java, but I'd like to jump in the deep end with a little database driven website project. I've read quite a lot about requirements in the 'real world' requesting experience with Spring and Hibernate, so I have those installed on netbeans and a project created (if I hit run I get the default spring page). Now I just need a little guidance as to where to start designing my app (please tell me if I'm getting in a bit too over my head for a beginner!).
Should I start off with my classes? - create all my classes as they map to my database tables and decide which attributes and methods each will require?
Can anyone suggest any good books for maybe.. making a java based website from scratch (i.e. from design right through to deployment) that might be useful for a beginner?
Any help appreciated thanks.
Edit: since posting this I've found a brilliant book that fits my needs just right to get started. Firstly I tried both spring in action and hibernate in action - but found both to be a bit too heavy for my novice mind. Instead I got the Java EE 5 Development with Netbeans 6 book https://www.packtpub.com/java-ee5-development-with-netbeans-6/book and its been a great help. If you use netbeans and are in a similar position to me, I'd say pick it up!
Too over your head? Depends on what you hope to accomplish. Are you trying to create a revenue-generating site to which users will be asked to trust credit card numbers and other sensitive information? Then yeah, you're getting way ahead of yourself. Is this a tool for personal use or a toy you're throwing together primarily as a learning experience? Then I say "Pffffft!" to the notion of over-the-head-ness. Go for it.
As to where to start, I say start with whatever portion of this beast is clearest to you. Have a solid idea of what the database is going to look like? Then start with it and its supporting classes. Have a clear vision of what the guts of the code are supposed to do? Start there. Etc. And if all things are equal, I'd say start at the bottom with the database layer and work your way up -- but that's just me.
And as for the books, can't help you there, but I'm sure somebody can.
I suggest to take a look at web application frameworks such as Spring's Roo or Grails. Sadly I have no experience with Roo. But I do have some experience with Grails.
With Grails you will be working mostly with Groovy, a language similar to Python, but still using the JVM. You'll still have the option to use Java anywhere you like (I think). Grails (and maybe Roo too?) manages Spring and Hibernate for you.
As for books on Grails, I recommend "Grails in Action". I have read a little of "Grails 1.1 Web Application Development" and it also seems to be a good reference. BTW, netbeans supports Grails too.
Not trying to gut your goals, but if you are wondering whether to start with your classes, I would suggest you work on your programming skills more.
I'd suggest taking a look at Larman's "Applying UML & Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development (3rd Edition)" as well as a book on relational database theory (you need to know how to model databases properly.)
You can try your hand at building a database driven web app, and it might give you an insight into how to do it, but you need have some programming maturity to take those skills into the non-trivial.
This is a completely personal opinion so please take it with a grain of salt: Before someone tackles the building of a data-driven application with the purpose of eventually being able to use it in non-trivial projects, that person needs to have a good exposure to programming (by good I mean a LOT, say 1-2 introductory courses, 1-2 intermediate and at least one junior-level course, perhaps a total of 15-30 credits.) Unless that person is a natural programming virtuoso, I don't see it happening otherwise.
I would suggest, if you are serious about programming, to spend a substantial amount on learning the fundamentals before tackling something like this.
Good luck.
Related
I am student. Currently, I am experienced with Core Java and very introductory Servlets and JSPs concepts.
For my summer internship, I have a task at hand where I am to develop a social CRM for a small startup.
I am very new to web development, I have no prior experience in this field, I am familiar with the technologies involved though, however I want to start off now and develop a good project in the summers.
I want to base my project on Java, I am considering using GWT for all client side AJAX work along with a J2EE server.
Would this be a right decision on my part? What is the learning curve involved with GWT? Can I really start off with something like a small CRM without doing nothing more than a HelloWorld previously?
Need some suggestions as to how should I kick start my work and progress quickly with concepts and my project as well.
If you want to develop a good project, like you say, then I believe this is a very fine choice. It's certainly not the easiest one (you could probably hack something quickly with PHP etc.), but I'd say that it really pays off.
I would suggest to follow the official tutorial and the remainder of the official documentation (stay away from the "Editors" framework for now though, it's madness at the moment.)
If you already have a solid background in Core Java, and if you get the right picture of how GWT works (eg which code is transformed to JavaScript / when HTTP requests will occur / ...) I think you can absolutely do it. Make sure to get some solid HTML/CSS and a little bit of JavaScript background first.
I must add, that I would personally not go the Roo route (sorry #jgrabowski) - especially not at first (probably not ever, even though Roo is probably a very good tool, if you like such tools.)
Understand the GWT technology,
create a few very simple prototype apps (just for fun),
then learn to apply best architecture practices, and improve your code.
And maybe you'll find, that a different architecture may even work better for your app (Just as an example: In the case of the largest application I'm currently working on, the generally-suggested MVP architecture would simply not work very well, at least not the way it's usually presented. So it's sometimes better to form a good solid understanding first, instead of blindly copying "best practices". Then you can make an informed decision, and develop a good project!)
You can start playing with Spring's Roo and generate GWT skeleton of your application. Then you can analyze it, try to understand it, improve it (and even remove Roo from it afterwards:-).
Roo is able to generate well architected GWT application that is inline with current best practices, so I believe it might be good start for you.
Found an excellent source for exploring GWT in depth.
I would stronly recommend the book "Google App Engine Java and GWT Application Development", as of now the book is quite updated on GWT, GAE and the APIs.
https://www.packtpub.com/google-app-engine-java-and-gwt-application-development/book
In recent months the GWT Activities and Places pattern has matured.
The example covered at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/trunk/DevGuideMvpActivitiesAndPlaces.html gives a broad introduction to the pattern. The downloadable sample will lead demonstrate how to 'slice' your application into Activities and Places. This pattern will take away some of your 'architecutre' concerns - you can just go with the flow and do it the A & P way.
Note, however the intro page and the demo code are very light on UI. Separate to your architecture planning you'll need to get up to speed on laying out a GWT app - but that's also covered well in the GWT articles. As #Chris-Lercher suggested, create a couple of UI prototypes that you're happy to throw away to get you started.
I am looking to start work on a brand-new project, something I've been thinking about for a while as my first independent sellable project.
It's broadly speaking a web-based service application, and my first choice, server-language is quite easy... I know Java pretty well from working on Java web-apps in the past.
However my experience doing web-apps involved JSP, Servlets and JSTL... I know the ideas behind newer technologies like Hibernate/Spring but have never used them. So we wrote our own DAOs, handled AJAX by writing special mini-JSP pages that generated XML/JSON pages, etc.
I'm not hugely into the idea that Spring/Hibernate are the 'only' or 'right' way to do any Java web-project, but they are widely used. On the other hand, not only would trying to learn these increase initial development time, but I'd be using my learning attempts to build a production system.
I remember one of Joel's early articles said (I'll paraphrase since I can't find it)
"regardless what's cool, always use
the technologies that the lead
developer (or dev team?) knows best"
I wondered what people thought about that?
ps: should this be CW?
I work as a consultant, and I've seen a lot of projects where the devs started out with servlets+JSP because that's what they knew, and it's pretty simple to get started with. However, it gives the team an opportunity/excuse to write a platform of their own, which is more fun than using someone else's and just writing an application.
As the project grows, the team reinvents more and more wheels, quite a few of which end up square. That's where I enter the picture - adding new stuff to this semi-flexible platform has become so complicated that the devs can't keep up adding features and fixing bugs without calling in reinforcements. Just to add insult to injury, the internal devs are usually the ones who get assigned to do the boring bug fixes because bug fixes require more knowledge of the gory entrails of what has become the team's proprietary persistence-and-web framework, and so those gosh-danged consultants get to do the new, fun stuff.
Now, you shouldn't use a framework just because people have been regurgitating each other's blog posts about the awesomeness of it, but you should also realize that there are very good reasons why those frameworks exist (and why they're used). If you haven't used any web frameworks at all, I'd recommend you to take Spring MVC, Wicket or whatever for a test drive. They don't solve all problems, and they do cause some of their own, but the grand total is usually a productivity increase, especially if you're making advanced user interfaces.
I have been on projects where plain JDBC has been quite sufficient for persistence, and where no more advanced web frameworks than servlets+JSP have been needed, but those projects are a minority. Without having used a framework or two, you'll never whether your project is part of that minority that doesn't need one, or if it is part of the grand majority that does.
Don't try everything all at once - take on one new technology at a time.
Beware the lure of cool new frameworks! I'm currently hacking on a tiny little web app that just has a login, a few mostly static pages, and a few forms to request some information by email. It would have taken me maybe two days to do as traditional Servlet/JSP in MVC style. Instead, since there was slack in the schedule, I decided to use this project to get up to speed in Spring, Spring MVC, and Spring WebFlow. While it's quite possible that I'm just dense, it took me several weeks to get my head around the right way of doing things, I'm still not totally confident that I'm doing everything correctly, and the application is still not done. Fortunately, due to slack, I'm not in danger of the overall project schedule slipping, but I'm always asking myself if I'm going to have to scrap it and start over.
I have learned my lesson, though: next time, I won't be the one pushing a new framework unless its one I've used for production projects before. That said, I'm glad I now understand Spring (or at least I think I do) and will not hesitate to use it again next time.
So how would I learn a new framework next time? If there's a project lead (in this case I'm a project lead of a team of one, no help there) I'd use the framework that they put in place. If there isn't, or if I want to learn a framework that the project lead isn't using, I'd use it for a side project on my own time. Learning is good. Putting company work at risk by throwing untested technology at it is not so good.
I can say for sure that Spring is worth considering. It gives you as much as you can take, but it doesn't bother you with things you don't need.
For example, at the very beginning you probably need dependency injection only. Then you'll need help with database interactions and transaction management. Then you'll decide to apply MVC patter to your web-application. After that may be you'll realize that components of your system are to send JMS to each other. And so on and so forth.
For all this cases Spring has it's own simple, intuitive, light-weight solution.
When starting a new project limit the number of unfamiliar technologies / frameworks to use. Every framework takes time to learn and every framework has issues especially if not implemented correctly.
If you can I would recommend you look into the Play framework. It is a web framework for Java that focuses on developer productivity. You can choose to use Spring / Hibernate if you want but you are not bound by that. It has a very easy to learn implementation and you should be able to get a good idea within a day of playing around with it if it is what you are looking for.
It depends what the customer wants (in the world of consultancy).
You have to learn new technologies. Does the customer wants to pay for that?
Not all the caveats of the new ones are known, whereas the older ones are proven a lot more.
Of course, if everybody thought like this we would all be stuck with VB these days. You have to look for the right balance, and learn a lot yourself too so you can get an objective view on the technologies available, their up and downsides.
i personally would definitely recommend looking into spring, i've found it's saved me countless hours. hibernate is also useful if you need an ORM layer (and spring has nice integrations with hibernate too). they're certainly not the 'only' or even the 'right' way to do things (that's quite subjective) but they have both saved me time and effort, especially spring.
There is one major trap with any unknown technology. You do not know where the dragons are, and you do not know how to rub the new technology "with the hairs".
Learning that will take time, and you need to have that in your estimates. Also your estimates will most likely be too low...
Greetings, everyone. I consider myself to be an intermediate developer, but, to be candid, probably closer to novice than expert. In any case, I have more experience with C# and the .NET platform, but my current job has me working almost exclusively with Java. This in itself is sort of a problem, but I'm dealing with it fine and I'm not really in a position to change my role at the moment.
On the side, I am starting to work on a highly interactive, database-driven web project. I'm doing it because I feel that it's a great idea and I know that the experience of doing something like this from scratch will help me immensely.
I initially wanted to go with ASP.NET MVC and I am still leaning that direction. I'm not even sure why, but I love the community behind it and, in my opinion, Visual Studio is the best IDE around. However, doing that would be counter-productive to my current job. That brought me to Grails. Even though I realize that Groovy is not Java, it seems to be similar enough (not to mention that it runs on the JVM) that the skills I learn should still help me at my current job. The more I looked into Grails, the more I loved it, especially after having to deal with what I consider to be an extremely complex J2EE environment at work.
But with the good I found the bad. I can't help but notice that there are a lot of developers who are irritated with the amount of bugs in Grails. Being that I am starting a new project and I am fairly inexperienced, do I even want to consider Grails? Is it a liability? And what's the consensus about its longevity? I would really hate to get too involved if there is a good chance of it fading into obscurity within the next few years. And even if the bugs and longevity issues aren't a huge deal, how would you compare the ease of development of Grails with that of ASP.NET MVC? I realize this last part is highly subjective. But for the sake of comparison, let's say that someone with virtually no technical background were in the same position. Would you recommend they take a look at ASP.NET MVC or Grails?
Thanks so much. If anything needs clarified or reworded, please let me know. I sincerely hope I'm not opening a can of worms...
I am the author of this question and I can give you some shares on my own experience.
As it is stated in the question, I had no real preferences and I was opened to any technology/platform that could fulfill my requirements. After many tries of different technologies (at leats few days with PHP, Rails, ASP and Grails) and some answers from StackOverflow, I ended up with the same dilemma as yours : Grails or ASP.NET MVC ?
And I chose Grails. Why? Because of GORM. Almost only because of GORM. This is fantastic to deal only with your domain classes and have your DB schema automatically generated/updated. Of course, it has its limits but this is so powerful for querying and maintening your DB. You do not write SQL anymore and it is very easy to learn.
Now here is my 2-cents comparison of the 2 technologies:
GRAILS STRENGTHS
GORM (see above)
Complete Web Stack Framework : you can generate a website in minutes and everything is already configured
A lot to learn : You have Spring MVC, Hibernate, Sitemesh, Java, JEE, Groovy...Once you have mastered Grails you can add an additional page into your resume
Java world. Whatever you need, if it already exist in Java, you can use it.
Groovy : I really like this programming language. It takes time to get familiar but once done, you will love it.
GRAILS WEAKNESSES
Memory usage. Grails/groovy is greedy for memory and it might cost more than ASP for Web Hosting
Grails bugs : there are some and when you start a new project on a new technology, you assume that most of the problems come from you...until you find out (after 1 or 2 days) that it is a Grails bug. So my advice is to proceed by steps : test as soon as possible and don't try to twist the framework. It is rough on the edge so go after what is generally recommended. However, after 2 months, I do not encounter big problems anymore.
Debugging : due to the multiple layers of frameworks, errors are generally hidden inside tons of exception lines. Also, the only decent IDE debugger is IntelliJ but this is not as easy to debug as .NET under VS
ASP.NET MVC STRENGTHS
The community : it's HUGE ! First it is supported by Microsoft and secondly 30% of the websites out there are built in ASP.NET. You can find any snippets of code, any widgets, any AJAX components, any CMS...Grails community is very active but can you rival against millions ?
Visual Studio : I definitely agree with you : there is no better IDE. IntelliJ is very good for Grails but having using both, I prefered VS
ASP.NET MVC WEAKNESSES
The youthness of ASP.NET : this is a young framework. Built on a stable technology but young enough (less than 2 years) to have also some bugs/some bad practices. Indeed, the next version of ASP.NET MVC is strongly awaited by the community.
Microsoft : even if ASP.NET MVC is open-source, you are totally dependent on their decisions (and prices).
The Bottom Line
If you project has tight deadline and if it is crucial for you to succeed, then go for ASP (according to your background). Otherwise, give a try to Grails..don't worry, you will also succeed but it will take more time. I am also deeply convinced that Grails has just started its long journey and it has a great future (see google trends)
Update by Dmitriy: If your refer to Google Trends you have to compare the 2 of them Groovy Grails and ASP.NET MVC.
Good luck
This is something that's been pretty much asked before here...
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:BpGj8RtSUIsJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/1283935/what-technology-asp-php-joomla-rails-grails-for-a-website-from-scratch+Which+technology+to+choose+%28ASP.net+or+Grails%29&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Good Luck though!
We're embarking on a project for a client. They plan on having about 50k users by the end of the year. We're pushing to use Pylons w/ Mako and SQLAlchemy, and our contact there is excited about it, but some of his colleagues are wary because it's not .NET or J2ee (they're used to enterprisey stuff).
Their web app will have some data analysis that we'll offload as well as a twang of social networking features. (basically all they have so far is some Flex mockups for UX)
I'm looking for some evidence with regard to development time, or other reasons that will help our argument to reassure the customer.
The other options is that we're barking up the wrong tree and have no idea. I hope that's not the case.
Any references to case studies or whatnot would be nice. The best I could find are
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/rubio-python-turbogears.html
and
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/devlin-python-oracle.html
which are a bit dated (wrt to TG2 and whatnot)
Thanks!
If you're looking for a success story for a customer, Virgin Charter is using Pylons with SQLAlchemy for their site. This is a high-value transaction system as people are booking very expensive flights through the site.
For a more high-traffic site, Reddit is now running on Pylons, along with Charlie Rose.
SQLAlchemy and Mako were both designed by Mike Bayer (A veteran Java programmer), SQLAlchemy being based on the best of Hibernate and with the same powerful principles and patterns that Hibernate supports.
If they're wary of deploying something they're not familiar with, Pylons runs on Jython, and the latest SQLAlchemy (0.6 branch) is about ready on Jython too. This would let you package up a full Pylons app into a WAR file for deployment which would reassure their Java-types.
For general Python, consider pointing out all the big animation studios that use it, and the other various srouces S.Lott points out.
It's almost easier to build a quick Proof of Concept service that demonstrates how clean and simple it is.
A simple SQLAlchemy mapping with a quick demo of query processing.
A simple template showing how cool Mako is.
A simple Pylons app to put the two together.
Most important -- use their application and their data. Not a lame hello world; not an existing tutorial.
If they want to compare your clean, elegant demo of their app with .NET and J2EE, they'll see that other languages lead to a much, much bigger code base.
Edit
Show them this: http://python.org/about/success/
Also, one of the best Python demos is to do things the way the SQLAlchemy and Django tutorials do things -- in interactive python from the >>> prompt. Nothing is more exciting than programming which is so simple you can do it interactively.
You won't find a lot of compelling case studies. Python is a community. .Net and J2EE are products. .Net has Microsoft's advertising backing it; Microsoft can afford to do extensive surveys and studies of their product. Same for Sun (soon to be Oracle) and J2EE -- lots of marketing hype backing up their claims.
Python just has what's on the Python.org site (http://python.org/about/). The various related projects (Pylons, Mako and SQLAlchemy) don't have lavish case study whitepapers. They do have a large number of downloads, and lots of word of mouth.
But if someone's looking for "proof" that Python works better than .Net, there's not going to be much.
They are crazy if they want to use j2ee imho. Visual Studio/C# is very nice, especially if you are not trying to do anything tricky. However, if you want to customize the C# way of doing things beyond what it was explicitly designed for it can quickly turn into a mess -- you get mired in automatically generated XML configuration files &c. Of course, I also think that Pylons with SQLAlchemy might turn into a mess because they too generate so much stuff that you ultimatly might end up having to reconfigure. If you want complete control, I would recommend a less intrusive environment, like Werkzueg. Please read my essay on writing MVC with no invisible means of support.
Because of the nature of new project we are about to start, I need to get into Java world rather quickly.
I have about 8 years of PHP experience, and about 3 year in Javascript.
(CI, Kohana and my own MVC framework)
I have solid knowledge of OOP (as much as you can get from PHP/JS and little ActionScript & python here and there)
So instead of learning from scratch, i was thinking to grab some web framework (at the end, project will be web based) and learn java along the way. Java code it self don't seam too strange, and i have solid experience with MVC in php so the whole concept makes sense to me.
So I'm looking a list of instructions on how should I learn Java.
(and not to spend too much time on things that are not so important)
Also you can suggest framework, from what i seen, struts looks nice, spring too, but it seam that it have too much XML configuration...
Start with a good book. I always found Thinking in Java pretty good, besides there is a free online version available. Skip the things you already know. Well you probably know what an object is and so on...
Next thing learn to use a good IDE. Have a look at Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse. Java without a proper IDE is useless.
If you transit from PhP you are probably going to develop some Web applications? This is a steep learning curve. JavaEE is big, complex and it takes a while to dig into all those frameworks. Propably you end up saying "Why is this so complicated, I can do it much easier in PhP". You will be right about that.
Can't give you a good recommendation about the frameworks that are suited best for you. We use Seam + Richfaces. Not that hard.
If you're switching from PHP, and looking at Web frameworks, then I'm assuming that you intend to continue Web development in Java. In that case I would spend a little bit of time on the Java Tutorials, then get into a book on Web programming in Java, like Head First Servlets and JSP. I think it will be a lot more focused on what you need than more general books on the Java language.
(source: oreilly.com)
I also find that once you learn the basics of servlets, JSP, and JSTL, it becomes much easier to understand any of the different Java-based Web frameworks.
None of them required extensive XML configuration anymore, those were the old days.
I will suggest you to grab Java concepts, anyway. Grab a good Java book to learn it along the way, as you said. Thinking in Java is good to go, but its just about core java and concepts. For java web you might want to look into Servlet and JSP basic, which you can learn using official J2EE Tutorial from Sun.
For Java web framework, there are plenty. But I would suggest you something you are already familiar with. You are right MVC based Java framework. Struts and Spring both are MVC frameworks and give you are clear separation of layers. Spring is a giant in itself, it has the answer for almost everything, that might confuse you in the start. Struts 1 is already outdated, and Struts 2 has a very tough competition.
I would suggest you to look into Wicket. It just a web framework, unlike Spring, and a very well written and easy to grasp.
Its a tough task, I must say. Lets see what other has to recommend.
Good point, nooomi. I would suggest Netbeans, its much more intuitive, and sleek.
IntelliJ is amazing, but commercial and not free.
Eclipse is not my type, lot of other folks are quite happy with that. You might find it good too.
So I'm looking a list of instructions
on how should I learn Java. (and not
to spend too much time on things that
are not so important)
I liked Head First Java, but I know some find the format offputting, and experienced programmers probably find it a bit simplistic, the SJCP Study Guide by same author (Kathy Sierra) goes more in-depth while keeping playful tone. There is of course the Java Tutorial online where you can get a quick overview of the main parts of the platform. Effective Java is a good "best practices" book once you have gotten the hang of the basics.
Also you can suggest framework, from
what i seen, struts looks nice, spring
too, but it seam that it have too much
XML configuration...
Another vote from me for Wicket as web framework. For persistence/db part, I recommend you look into iBatis before trying Hibernate. This is a "sql query" oriented framework rather than object-relational mapping, so it will probably feel more familiar to you. I haven't used it yet myself, but from what I have heard it probably has fewer "gotchas" (with regards to caching, performance etc) than Hibernate too.