designforweb.co.uk/blog

I'm going to echo JulianBH. I'd leave the sever-side stuff alone until you're more than just acquainted with webdesign.

I think Mike's quite wrong in saying you can't build anything without a server side language. Sure you can make web apps with them but I think it's more important to find your focus...

Ultimately, everybody falls under one of two labels: designer or developer. One can do the other's job but most people find it easy to tell what they enjoy doing the most.

Therefore, I think it's important that you give one a thorough go before you consider moving on. PHP (et al) rely on your presentation skills so much that I think you need to know what you're doing there before you take it up.

So what does that mean to do? Making mock-ups really.If you can make sexy mocks, you can make sexy templates. If you can make the templates, you can use them in PHP. If you can use them in PHP, you'll have an absolutely awesome time developing things.

Java is an excellent classroom language. It has fairly good ideas about classes, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction and even generics. Those are all things you get a fairly skewed perspective about from a language like PHP. That's what makes Java a very popular language being taught at universities.

C# (one of MS's .net languages) is very much like it. There are a few different keywords and the package structure is quite different but the syntax and ideas are all the same gag. By learning Java to a fairly high standard, writing C# should seem like a walk in the park.

You also get familiar with the C syntax which means Java can be a perfect gateway to something like C++ too.

How is that relevant? Because between Java and .net, you account for a massive proportion of the technology jobs

In the previous article we took a look at some of the components that are used most often in Tapestry applications and learned some important concepts related to them. At the end we found that we needed three components for our example application. In this article we will configure those components. We will also learn how to disable caching....
Java Hosting on Tomcat $9.95 Java, Struts, Hibernate and WebObjects hosting on Tomcat and JBoss.

PHP/MySQL are definitely tools you should have in your toolbox if you want to actually "build" anything as opposed to handing stuff off to other people.

Depends on what type of developer you want to be. Not many shops use J2EE for their web apps unless they're big companies or have some intense architectures, so if you learned J2EE you'd probably be doing some bigtime projects, not the kiddy stuff.

On the other hand, if you learned normal Java for writing desktop apps, you'd be writing desktop software (obviously) but a lot less efficiently than if you knew C or other high-level languages.

FYI: I know Java but haven't written it in a few years, same with J2EE stuff.

I'm looking at job listings. I'm looking all over the place.

It seems like there are a lot of companies wanting Java developers. I would click the ads, to find out exactly what they need them for, but I'm actually confident in my supposition that they want Java developers to do in Java would could be done much more easily, and much more productively in another language, like the one's I have skills in.

However, I've had a hard enough time with corporate entities trying to share with them the more productive ways to develop software and web applications, only to waste time.

I'm not ruling out however, the idea that there's still something I'm missing. So I turn the floor open to you guys:

What's the whoop about Java, any reason I should add it to the utility belt?