New to Frameworks

[Danish Shaukat]

Hi,

I have been developing web applications for afew months now and have a good understanding of Servlets, JSP, JDBC and application of MVC design pattern.

Question 1:
The next step in the learning process is Frameworks. Why do we need them? Why cannot we just develop applications based on Servlets and JSP?

Question 2:
If it is necessary to learn and use frameworks which one should I start with?

Regards,
Zain

[David Newton]

Zain Shaukat wrote:Why do we need them? Why cannot we just develop applications based on Servlets and JSP?

You can--and if you're comfortable doing the same work over and over and over again, there's no problem with that.

Frameworks exist (in theory) to reduce the amount of work you have to do, provide usage pattern guidelines, and clean up a lot of junk associated with plain old servlets.

If it is necessary to learn and use frameworks which one should I start with?

Totally depends on your needs and goals.

[Danish Shaukat]

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for the reply.

What in your opinion should be my goals if I want to use frameworks? Which framework should I learn to start with?

Regards,
Zain

[David Newton]

I have no idea what your goals should be--why do you want to learn a framework? For a job? For personal edification? For personal use? For research?

I don't have any good way of telling you what framework you "should" learn; it depends entirely on your purpose.

[Danish Shaukat]

Hi David,

Most of the job ads these days for J2EE developers require knowledge of frameworks. I have seen struts, spring and hibernate etc mentioned at many places. So primarily I would like to learn something that I can use while developing java based web applications. So yes learning for a job is a goal.

Regards,
Zain

[David Newton]

Then I guess learn whatever is in the most demand near where you want to work.