Best ways to keeping up with new technology

[Elle Atechsy]

Hi Everyone,

I'm searching for the best way to keep up with new technologies. I would appreciate some suggestions of web sites, magazines, etc. on where to keep up with new web application technologies & best pratices.

For example, after assisting with development on a fairly complex application with pure JDBC, someone later suggested that we should have used something like Ibatis or Hibernate. That it would have taken half the time and probably much more efficient & reliable. How could I have found that out without asking someone because our team thought we were doing the right thing at the time?

All suggestions are very much appreciated in advance.

Elle

[Jan Cumps]

someone later suggested that we should have used something like Ibatis or Hibernate. That it would have taken half the time and probably much more efficient & reliable.

No it wouldn't. They have a lot to offer, but they don't just halve the development time, and they don't just make a well built JDBC based application more efficient or reliable.

For keeping up to date, I subscribe to the Sun Java Technology newsletter (standard and enterprise);
to Java Lobby to pick up latest buzz;
contribute to some open source projects;
and read the occasional book.
(and, if possible, try to use the valuable things in my job)

Regards, Jan
[ September 23, 2007: Message edited by: Jan Cumps ]