Resources to learn and understand state-of-the-art web development in Java ?

Question

Hi

I'm trying to learn web development in Java and, from what I have seen so far, I think it's easy to get lost in the endless numbers of libraries, frameworks, techniques available. Too many books focus on some specific component (Spring, Hibernate, JSP, ...) and give only "hello world" examples.

I'm looking for books or web resources that let you understand the whole picture and provide "real world" examples, including several frameworks, techniques, in the same example. Can you recommend any book?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think it would help to narrow your scope a bit. If you can list some requirements to measure against, it will be much easier to look for a solution and start learning. As you mentioned, its such a big space, it would be very hard to try to learn without some focus.

Answer 2

The trouble is that, as you point out, there are so many frameworks that any survey worthy of the name would (at best) give you nothing more than a list of trivial examples.

I'd suggest building a basic spring website with a simple web container (tomcat). It's probably the most popular thing and will give you a good grounding on what follows. After that the next thing you'd want to add would be hibernate.

If you can get a basic web form up and running based on spring and hibernate you'll have a good grounding to expand on. After that you could look at some of the many GUI frameworks, but that's certainly a good start.

Answer 3

I like POJOs in action because (besides is kinda old) it explains clearly the approach of the emerging applications using POJOs and therefore Spring, Hibernate and many other popular frameworks

Answer 4

Java Web development is a very huge field. I have read several books on the topic, but find this one very helpful for the basics of Java web development in general:

Bryan Basham: "Head First Servlets and JSP: Passing the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam" (Paperback)

It covers the foundations on which all the Java web frameworks build upon (web application container, environment, deployment, lifecycle...) in a very accessible way, however: it does not give you an overview over the huge amount of frameworks that are available. As another answer mentions, you probably want to narrow the scope, most frameworks have an area they solve differently and which they solve better than others (e.g. component-based, MVC,...).