Sunday, August 19, 2012

Reacquainting myself with Java web application development

After a few years in a technical management role, I am reacquainting myself with hands-on Java web application development. After all, nothing says "can do" like "have done" -- however there's an almost bewildering amount of choice when it comes to picking frameworks.

I decided I would start by looking at Spring, Tapestry, Wicket and maybe plain EE6 as that would cover the most popular setups people seem to be using. Additionally I have chosen to use NetBeans as my IDE (I always had a soft spot for NetBeans, and it's looking pretty good these days), Maven as my build tool and JPA/Hibernate for persistence.

I decided to build a web app for managing information about job opportunities. Something that might help keep one on top of things amid the phone calls from recruiters, talent acquisition managers and the various phone screens and interviews.

Minimally, this app would have a way to enter information about jobs, and review the list of jobs. This would all be on a single page. Beyond that there are a few other things I may add once I have the basics in the various different frameworks figured out including:

  • Making the form submit / addition of a job AJAX based to eliminate page refresh 
  • Editing job information 
  • Changing status of jobs (applied, phone screen, in person interview etc.) 
  • Bringing in jQuery and looking at some sexy transitions to reveal and hide the "add job" form, sortable table etc. 
  • Paging of the jobs table (granted I hope nobody needs to apply for so many jobs that paging is required…but interested to see how this pans out) 
  • An entirely gratuitous web service of some kind…
OK, so first up is Spring. A blog post on my experiences there will follow shortly.

2 comments:

  1. As a java Web Developer,they should have all knowledge of frameworks.Good to see that you provide this detail.i think now-a-days hibernate,spring and Struct2 are more used.

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  2. If you are a web developer with a basic understanding of the REST concepts but are new to the idea of designing and developing RESTful web services, this is the book for you. As all the code samples for the book are written in Java, proficiency in Java is a must. CodCow

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