Java J2EE: A Shotgun Start

By Dennis Gesker

January 13, 2003

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In my experience learning curves tend to follow a familiar pattern. The curve related to working with a new technology can initially feel rather steep. After this point, for some time, your journey along the learning curve is smooth sailing. You are comfortable with the technology as an everyday tool and you apply this technology to address everyday challenges.

This relatively flat portion of the curve continues until you reach a point where your expertise begins to push the limits of the technology and then, again, the learning curve seems steep. The J2EE architecture appears to be a platform intent on ensuring an extended and productive ride on the flat part of the learning curve.

For developers that have traditionally written stand alone applications, making the jump from stand-alone applications to applications structured around J2EE can be a little steep. Like me, many of you are probably IT professionals who presently support custom in-house applications, written in a variety of languages and written to run on legacy platforms. As you look around your organization you may be concluding that these applications are beginning to show their age. You may dread starting the climb up this learning curve, particularly when time resources are in short supply. This article intends to help reduce the initial learning curve for those who would like to begin making use of the J2EE architecture.

We're going to cut to the chase and build a J2EE application together. This application will be the rough equivalent of the ubiquitous Hello World application. The difference between our Hello World and ones you've written in the past is that it will be a fully enterprise architecture-ready Hello World. Rock on!

So, how are we going to accomplish this in the space of one short article? We're going to drastically oversimplify the terminology involved, skipping technical details along the way, and just do it. We're going to fetch some tools from the Internet, set up a J2EE application server, and set up a development environment.

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