Important frameworks/tools to learn

Question

Heyja,

a frequently used answer to the question "What is so special about Java?" is "The tools and frameworks". I guess this is correct. I am stunned when i see all the tools and frameworks which make your life as a developer much easier.

My Java skills are not perfect, but good average, and i am still working on it. I have begun to learn Ant for example and i don't want to miss it. It's awesome. The same with Hibernate. Now i ask myself what i should learn next. I want to gain experience for myself and especially my CV. Unfortunately there are so many of it. And everybody is talking about it, like Spring, Struts, JavaServer Faces, Maven, ...

What is widely used in the real world? What tools besides Ant or Subversion/CVS are important? What framework is necessary to learn to be accepted as a "real Java programmer" and to get the interesting jobs? ;-)

Answer 1

If we're talking marketability, then you ideally want to be the kind of developer who can be productive at any layer of a production app. So learn something about each layer.

• MVC: Struts, Spring MVC.
• Data Access: Hibernate, iBatis, JPA.
• IOC: Spring (huuuuge for integrating large systems. If you can, learn the AOP principles that Spring is based on)
• App Server: Tomcat, JBoss.
• Testing: JUnit
• Presentation: JSF, JSP.

Also, don't neglect the non-Java technologies you need to know:

• SQL - because you will need to talk directly to the database
• HTML
• JQuery - never underestimate the importance of neat UI features. For most users, that's the only part of what you do that they understand.

If I had to choose one thing out of this list, I'd go for Spring. If choosing two, I'd take Spring and JQuery.

Answer 2

If you want to be perceived as an expert Java programmer, there's no substitute for knowing the standard Java class libraries inside and out. I've seen way too many examples of Java programmers, even experienced ones, re-implementing things from the standard class libraries because they don't know they're in there.