Travels with FatCatAir

Wednesday November 02, 2005

J2EE Class

So as I've previously mentioned I'm taking Sang Shin's online J2EE course. I tried to take this course quite a while ago and got completely swamped with it and other things so I had to give up about halfway. It's apparently a lot longer ago than I thought since that was I think the 2nd offering and now is the 9th session.

When I took it the first time the thing that impressed me was what a pain it was to build and deploy J2EE apps. In that incarnation everything was done by hand. I had to locate and install Pointbase and JWSDP on my (now) old linux server and get them functional. All the ant scripts were done by hand. It was a lot of junk that didn't seem that important to the task at hand.

What a difference it is this time! This time I downloaded three packages, the Sun Appserver and Netbeans 4.1 and the J2EE tutorial. I could probably have downloaded the combined appserver package from the netbeans site but I didn't. In any case it was simple to get it up and running. Starting and stopping the appserver and pointbase is right in the netbeans ide. I've competely avoided doing any manual ant scripts and ant runs doing the homeworks. I've done every bit from the ide. Netbeans has made this attempt at the class much easier and enjoyable. I'm still wondering why I'm learning J2EE since I'm a vm guy but it has been interesting to see how all this stuff fits together and what is going on behind the scenes at all the various websites.
Nov 02 2005, 02:23:32 PM EST Permalink