Blog4Java

A personal and Java blog, likely only for me

Improving Java EE skills (including Spring)

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A friend of mine has requested me some help for improving his skills in Java EE and Spring Framework.

An exciting question, indeed.

The general context

He’s working for a company since 2008. To work for a company for a long time has a lot of pros, but a couple of drawbacks, being one of them a little bit worrying: the chance of obsolescence.

If you’re using the same environment along the years, let’s say IBM products, you’ll loose the chance to discover other approaches, for instance Oracle solutions, or even better, open source projects.

Even worst, if the company are not willing to upgrade their products (that is very reasonable if there are budget concerns) or their libraries (that is really unwise, or the direct consequence that you don’t have a good testing process) suddenly you find yourself that you’re out of the market.

This is not really a problem as long as your current technology is the best technology for your needs, but sooner or later you have to face to the technical debt (a really interesting topic that you should care about). This day will happen when you’re spending more time in fixing issues than in adding new features to your software.

The problem continues if you try to reinventing the wheel or if you don’t realize that the plane is already invented. It’s 21st century, you can fly with the appropriate machine.

The particular concern

As I said at the beginning of this entry, he is a Java EE developer that uses Spring Framework in his daily work. But he still has to program for WebSphere Application Server 6.1 (a.k.a. WAS 6.1, that is Java EE 1.4 compliance using Java 5 SE) using Spring framework 3 (2.5 for some projects)

At the time of this writing, Java EE 7 is already released and the current version of Spring Framework is 4.0.6. Not mentioning that Java 8 is now with us.

Thus, he wants to get up to date for improving the way he writes code that will be profitable for the company he works for.

I appreciate his request, because I’ll have to review what I really know.

Well. Enough introduction. In coming posts I will write about my particular thoughts of what you can do to know Java a little better.

Next, a summary of the topics that I want to talk about:

Suggested topics

That’s all for now. I hope my colleague finds this entry interesting and I wish it is the first of a series of articles.

Let’s see.

Author: Javier (@jbbarquero)

Java EE developer, swim addict, occasional videogames player, fan of Ben Alex and Shamus Young, and deeply in love with my wife. Sooner or later I'll dedicate a post to expand this simple introduction.

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