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Java EE Technologies needed for an Advanced Website.

 
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Which Java EE technologies should I learn in order to do an advanced Java Web Application. I want to do something like an online ordering system with colorful backgrounds.

I thought about JSF and JavaScript. Can anyone point me into the right direction and possibly which tag libraries to use. This is for learning purposes only.




Does anyone recommend any JavaScript resources?
 
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The skills you need fall into two areas : front-end and back-end. Generally, people who paint pretty pictures are not the same people that make the paint , paint brush , or canvas. What I mean to say is Amazon.com was not created by a lone developer working by himself.

What do you mean advanced ? You are talking about building an e-Commerce site. Which business partner will process your credit card transactions ? How will you interface to that business partner ? You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.
 
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Roger Sterling wrote:You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.



I completely agree.

Once you have answered some of these questions, here is a webcast that the Virtual Java User Group on meetup.com did last week on "Comparing JVM Web Frameworks".

This doesn't tell you which one is best. It gives a lot of good information about each and help you to decide which one would work best for you and your project.

Happy Coding!
 
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I would also personally steer you away from JSF. It is, in my opinion, an over-complicated, Rube Goldberg machine that not only adds much more complexity than is even marginally reasonable, but it's an old-fashioned, clunky way of doing things that stinks of the tar pits.

If you want to teach yourself something that will be more useful in the future, look to RESTful APIs and JavaScript MVC frameworks. The future is coming and heavyweight, server-side processing of the presentation layer isn't where it's at.
 
Charles Sexton
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Roger Sterling wrote:The skills you need fall into two areas : front-end and back-end. Generally, people who paint pretty pictures are not the same people that make the paint , paint brush , or canvas. What I mean to say is Amazon.com was not created by a lone developer working by himself.

What do you mean advanced ? You are talking about building an e-Commerce site. Which business partner will process your credit card transactions ? How will you interface to that business partner ? You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.



Are their not any templates or pictures that are available?
 
Charles Sexton
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Bear Bibeault wrote:I would also personally steer you away from JSF. It is, in my opinion, an over-complicated, Rube Goldberg machine that not only adds much more complexity than is even marginally reasonable, but it's an old-fashioned, clunky way of doing things that stinks of the tar pits.

If you want to teach yourself something that will be more useful in the future, look to RESTful APIs and JavaScript MVC frameworks. The future is coming and heavyweight, server-side processing of the presentation layer isn't where it's at.



Which api's do you recommend for me to look at?
 
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Roger Sterling wrote:The skills you need fall into two areas : front-end and back-end. Generally, people who paint pretty pictures are not the same people that make the paint , paint brush , or canvas. What I mean to say is Amazon.com was not created by a lone developer working by himself.

What do you mean advanced ? You are talking about building an e-Commerce site. Which business partner will process your credit card transactions ? How will you interface to that business partner ? You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.



I am not developing anything near the size of amazon, just something basic with about 10 to 12 web pages. It's just for practice, I will look into business partners for credit card transactions.
 
Bear Bibeault
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Charles Sexton wrote:Which api's do you recommend for me to look at?



That depends. If you really want to stay in the Java eco-system, ignore all the frameworks for now and concentrate on plain old servlets and JSP until you have those down cold. Then, and only then, consider the more modern frameworks like SpringMVC or Play. Struts is getting long in the tooth, and JSF is just an abomination.

Regardless, learning how to create and consume RESTful APIs is something you should know.

If you want to embrace client-side frameworks, there are a lot of players without any clear winner at this point. Backbone with Handlebars is one popular combination, AngularJS is another possibility. Most of the others are pretty much also-rans at this time.

jQuery is a must no matter what road you take.
 
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I think JSF is a good start point, as it is easy and integrate pretty well with many other Java technologies. You may find tons of tutorials about it and there are many projects using it in enterprises, which might help a lot. After some time using the features available in JSF and exploring the libraries such as Richfaces, you might get very experienced with java as well and could try other web frameworks (such as GWT) as the learning curve with be shorter.
 
Roger Sterling
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Charles Sexton wrote:

Roger Sterling wrote:The skills you need fall into two areas : front-end and back-end. Generally, people who paint pretty pictures are not the same people that make the paint , paint brush , or canvas. What I mean to say is Amazon.com was not created by a lone developer working by himself.

What do you mean advanced ? You are talking about building an e-Commerce site. Which business partner will process your credit card transactions ? How will you interface to that business partner ? You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.



Are their not any templates or pictures that are available?




Ok, here's a picture...


 
Roger Sterling
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Charles Sexton wrote:

Roger Sterling wrote:The skills you need fall into two areas : front-end and back-end. Generally, people who paint pretty pictures are not the same people that make the paint , paint brush , or canvas. What I mean to say is Amazon.com was not created by a lone developer working by himself.

What do you mean advanced ? You are talking about building an e-Commerce site. Which business partner will process your credit card transactions ? How will you interface to that business partner ? You need answers to questions like these before you contemplate writing the code.



I am not developing anything near the size of amazon, just something basic with about 10 to 12 web pages. It's just for practice, I will look into business partners for credit card transactions.



Ok, when looking at the Amazon feature toolkit, which of the features will you not implement in order to simplify your effort ?
 
Charles Sexton
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Luan Cestari wrote:I think JSF is a good start point, as it is easy and integrate pretty well with many other Java technologies. You may find tons of tutorials about it and there are many projects using it in enterprises, which might help a lot. After some time using the features available in JSF and exploring the libraries such as Richfaces, you might get very experienced with java as well and could try other web frameworks (such as GWT) as the learning curve with be shorter.



My professor told us to use JSF as it relatively has replaced JSP. I would like to learn JavaScript and JQuery but I would prefer to learn JavaScript first as you need to know the basics of JavaScript. JQuery is a library for JavaScript. I hate using JSF by the way and would much rather use some other framework for development.
 
Charles Sexton
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Roger Sterling wrote:





This is something that I would make my final update to my project look like, but definitely not anytime soon, maybe in 6 to 8 months. I work by incremental steps while learning and I need more practice in java web applications.
 
Bear Bibeault
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Charles Sexton wrote:My professor told us to use JSF as it relatively has replaced JSP.


Not to bad-mouth your prof, but nothing could be further from the truth. JSF has a relatively small penetration, and, as I said, the industry is moving away from heavy server-side lifting.
 
Bear Bibeault
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Charles Sexton wrote:I would like to learn JavaScript and JQuery but I would prefer to learn JavaScript first as you need to know the basics of JavaScript. JQuery is a library for JavaScript.


Yes, learn at least the basics of JavaScript before diving off into jQuery or any of the client-side MVC frameworks.

If you want to prepare yourself to be viable in the web industry, JavaScript is an absolute must.

I hate using JSF by the way and would much rather use some other framework for development.


You are far from alone in that respect.
 
Charles Sexton
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Bear Bibeault wrote:

Charles Sexton wrote:I would like to learn JavaScript and JQuery but I would prefer to learn JavaScript first as you need to know the basics of JavaScript. JQuery is a library for JavaScript.


Yes, learn at least the basics of JavaScript before diving off into jQuery or any of the client-side MVC frameworks.

If you want to prepare yourself to be viable in the web industry, JavaScript is an absolute must.

I hate using JSF by the way and would much rather use some other framework for development.


You are far from alone in that respect.




Can JavaScript provide an excellent user interface?
 
Charles Sexton
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Bear Bibeault wrote:

Charles Sexton wrote:My professor told us to use JSF as it relatively has replaced JSP.


Not to bad-mouth your prof, but nothing could be further from the truth. JSF has a relatively small penetration, and, as I said, the industry is moving away from heavy server-side lifting.




To be honest I thought he was a good professor but he had that know it all type of attitude......But I agree I don't like JSF at all
 
Bear Bibeault
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Charles Sexton wrote:Can JavaScript provide an excellent user interface?


The UI for any web app or site is provided by the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript -- the mighty triad of the web. No one technology can deliver the UI; they are used in concert.

One could very successfully argue that a modern dynamic UI is impossible without JavaScript.
 
Charles Sexton
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Bear Bibeault wrote:

Charles Sexton wrote:Can JavaScript provide an excellent user interface?


The UI for any web app or site is provided by the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript -- the mighty triad of the web. No one technology can deliver the UI; they are used in concert.

One could very successfully argue that a modern dynamic UI is impossible without JavaScript.



Looks like I'm studying JavaScript, are their any resources that you or anyone else are willing to recommend.......
 
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For a first JavaScript book, to tell you truth, not really. I don't think that there's a really really good first JavaScript book out there that I've had a chance to review. Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide isn't a bad book, but it may not be all that accessible to JavaScript novices.

There are some JS books on Amazon that have good reviews -- I haven't had the chance to read them all yet. You'll have to trust your judgement on the reviews.

Afterwards, of course I'm going to recommend my own books: Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja (which is decidedly not your first JavaScript book), and jQuery in Action (2nd Ed) (maybe 3rd edition will be out by the time you get to it).

 
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Scott Winterbourne wrote:here is a webcast that the Virtual Java User Group on meetup.com did last week on "Comparing JVM Web Frameworks".

- A pretty subjective comparison.
 
Scott Winterbourne
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Indeed it is. It does have some useful information in it though.

I think a lot of reviews and comparisons will be somewhat bias based on who is doing the review. As long as you yourself don't buy into opinion but focus on taking away the facts they can still be useful.

It all comes down to what you need to do with the framework and which one seems like it's better set up to do what you need it to do. That will still leave you with a bunch that can fulfill your needs. Then is a matter of picking one that seems like if it's more your style, or more people on your team have experience with it, or a coin flip . There's no one correct answer.
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