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I am learning programming, I learned Java, I took a little experience with Android, I made a simple application, then I started to learn flutter, I took a course and i created a simple application, and now many people tell me and I see that the web is more widespread and has more job opportunities, and I want to be a Frontend developer What would you advise me to continue learning flutter or go to the web because I want to work as a freelancer or in a company?
I think everyone would agree that only you yourself can decide what to do with your own life. We have neither right to decide it for you nor will to bear such responsibility.
"I want to fly planes, but I also want to drive a bus or maybe I should be a train operator?" All those professions have the "driver/pilot" role in common, yet they are very different. Just because everything you mentioned involves programming, doesn't mean it is all the same and learning a few lines of code here and there doesn't make a pro, but I'm sure you know that.
If you want a decent job, I suggest you to explore your local job market, see what real companies need most. Then think about the future - will they still need it by the time you finish studying it?
Keep in mind that the tech landscape in always changing. Flutter can be hot now, but in few years - who knows? For example, nobody in their sane mind today really considers Xamarin and C# as something to learn for cross-platform mobile dev, but it had future.. at some point. Anyway, hope you get the idea.
personally, I advise you to expose yourself to as many technologies as you can to increase your chances of obtaining a job and also because there is no way of knowing for sure which technologies your future employer will require from you and hence I say go ahead and learn web development since it's one of the most wanted skillsets in software development.
as for freelancing it really depends on what type of freelancing jobs you want or will accept.
thank you.
You are right, it is easier to find a job in web development than in mobile app development, my suggestion is that you continue on web development, your aim should not be to become a front-end developer only but rather try to become a fullstack web developer.
If your goal is to quickly get a job, I would stick with Android and maybe learn iOS as well. There are plenty of jobs in mobile, even as a junior developer. I would not invest too heavily in Flutter, it has all but lost the hybrid mobile framework user space, at least from a jobs perspective. Pick up React Native if you must. Learning web from scratch will be difficult; there are lots of nuances and different technology stacks, and companies are often looking for a wide variety of experience.
I have to develop an ERP System for a 2,000+ end users organisation.
Could you please suggest me with comparable points that among (Java or .Net)
in which technology I should invest money and time? Although I have done
some average projects in both, but this project is going to be very big in near
future in terms of scalability.
I want to know your experiences and some tips from you people, so that I can develop
and deploy this project efficiently.
I rate .Net > Java for this project only due to less development time available.
We have to use some Rapid App Development technology.
I have to deploy this on Cloud (Azure or Google App engine).
It will be better if I got answers from those people who works in both (.Net and Java).
I will appreciate answers from your experiences.
I would suggest creating a very small proof-of-concept project in both technologies, which do something real - like allow people to log in, see messages, and allow them to type in new messages, and log out again.
Even if the project is laughably small, if you do it well, you will have a finished product on each platform which have shown you by experience how things works and if you like the way you had to do them. You will be able to see if you can debug in the cloud, if you can profile when load testing, if you can do fast work inhouse which then works well when deployed to the cloud.
And you will need to figure out things. Are the online resources good? How responsive is the StackOverflow community for each platform when you ask questions?
Personally, I consider the ".NET is Windows-only" to be important. Except for that I do not believe there is any technical showstopper for either platform.
I think both approaches can be used to deliver this successfully. I would expect you to have the same amount of success/pain with either choice. When it comes to making a decision you should base it on the amount of expertise that you have to hand. That is, your own and that of your existing colleagues and the resources that you can acquire (new recruits, contractors, consultants etc.).
That said a couple of technical notes:
The Java approach tends to have more freedom, i.e. more frameworks and choice of technologies for various solutions (although GAE will bring in some restrictions).
There is less choice in the .NET space, but that is not always a bad thing. E.g. you tend not end up in tireless debates about the logging frameworks.
Java is starting to age as a language and C# is a bit nicer, however there a number of newer languages that run on the Java VM (Scala, Groovy, Ruby, Clojure).
I intend to make some software to be sold over internet. I've only created open-source before, so I have really no idea of how to protect it from being cracked and distributed as warez. Bearing in mind that I know like two programms that aren't either cracked or not really useful I decided that the only more or less reliable way may look like this:
Connect to a server and provide licensing info and some sort of hardware summary info
If everything is fine, the server returns some crucial missing parts of the program bound to that certain pc along with the usage limit of say 2 days
That crucial stuff is not saved to hard drive, so it is downloaded every time the program starts, if the programm runs more than 2 days, data is downloaded again
If the same info is used from different computers, suspend the customer account
What do you think about this? It may seem a bit to restrictive, but I'd better make less sales at first then eventually see my precious killer app downloaded for free. Anyways, first I need some basic theory/tutorials/guides about how to ensure that user only uses a certain Java app if he has paid for it, so please suggest some.
Thanks
I work for a company selling protected Java software.
I won't comment on the scheme for user authentication, but I can comment on the online license check.
Don't make it even "work for two days": that's how I pirate most software... Virtual Machine set "back in time" and externally firewalled so that it doesn't "phone home" anymore (that is: only allowing it to contact the server once, to get the trial key), always reimaged from the point where the software got freshly installed and bingo, the 30-days trial (or two days trial) has become a lifetime trial. Why do I do this? To learn how to better protect our app of course ;) (ok, ok, I do it just for fun too)
What we do in our commercial Java software is to check the license at every startup.
We've got hundreds of customers and nobody ever bitched about it. Not once. We generate a unique class at each run, which is different at every run, which depends both on things unique for that launch on the client side and on things generated once on the server side.
In addition to that having the app contact your server at every launch is a great way to gather analytics: download to trial ratio, nb average launches per trial, etc. And it's not nasty anymore than having an Urchin/Google JavaScript tracker on each webpage is nasty.
Simply make it clear to people that your software performs the online licence check: we'got a huge checkbox either on or off saying: "Online licence verification: OK/Failed". And that's it. People know there's a check. If they don't like it, they go use inferior competitor products and life is good.
People are used to live in a wired world.
How often can you not access GMail because your Internet connection is down? How often can you not access FaceBook or SO because your Internet connection is down?
Point is: make as much computation as possible dependent on the server side:
licence check
save user preferences
backup of the data generated by your app
etc.
Nobody will complain. You'll have 0.1% of your user complain and anyway you don't want these users: they're the one who would complain about other things and post negative feedback about your app online. You better have them not to use your software at all and complain about the fact that it requires an always-on Internet connection (which 99.99% of your target demographic and hence they won't care about the complain) rather than actually have them use the app, and complain about other things related to your app.
Regarding decompiling, .class can usually be decompiled back to .java unless you're using a code flow obfuscator that produces valid bytecode but that it impossible to be generated from .java file (hence it is impossible to get back a valid .java file).
String obfuscator helps make it harder to figure out.
Source code obfuscator helps make it harder to figure out.
Bytecode obfuscator like the free Proguard makes it harder (and produce faster code, especially noticeable in the mobile world) to figure out.
If you're shipping Windows/Linux only then you can use a Java-to-native converter like Excelsior Jet (not free and kinda expensive for startups, but it produces native code from which you simply cannot find the .java files back).
As a funny side note you'll see people trying to mess with your online server... At about 30 beta-testers we had already people (which we know where part of the trial) trying to pirate our online servers.
I am sorry to turn you down, but first you should have an idea of what you want to build; then you should prove that your idea not only works, but is also loved by users to the point where they want to pirate it. Thirdly, you have to make sure that the time you are investing in making it "secure" is actually worth the value of the application.
If you sell it for a dollar, and you only sell ten copies, and you spent 100 hours making it secure, you do the math and tell me if your time was worth that little money.
The take-home message here is: everything can be cracked or copied. At the end there are much brighter people than us doing this (iPhone cracking, digital TV, games, etc) and nobody found the silver bullet. Only thing you can do is make it harder to crack your application (often at the expenses of usability, ease of installation, and by cutting corners for some use scenarios). Asking yourself if it's worth the hassle it's always a good starting point.
Don't bother.
The gaming industry has been battling piracy for decades. Online multiplayer games with a central server typically require a subscription to play. That model is fairly resistant to piracy. Pretty much all other games are heavily pirated, despite innumerable attempts at DRM.
Your app will be cracked and pirated, no matter what language you write it in and what tools you use to prevent it. If your DRM actually works, the people who would have pirated it still won't buy it. Furthermore, legitimate users will prefer other products that don't have intrusive DRM. If there are no competing products and yours has any market to speak of, someone will create one.
Unless your application is specifically web based your users will find it to be a huge hassle to require an internet connection in order that they might access the product. What you are suggesting will work, unless it gets broken, like all DRM systems do. I understand the want to protect your intellectual property, but with many companies as examples, these systems are usually broken or the product does much worse because of them.
I have really no idea of how to
protect it from being cracked and
distributed as warez.
First, you'd be better choosing a language besides Java, if this is a concern. This is why C++ is still alive and well in the commercial apps world. Unless you are going to use an actual Java compiler to native exe, I'd reconsider Java for IP protection reasons.
For that matter, even C++ isn't impervious to cracking, but IP prorection vs. cracking are two separate, important concerns.
That's a really tricky task, especially with something running in a VM.
I would say you might be thinking in the right direction. Obfuscating it to make it reasonably hard to modify might prevent people from circumventing the built in licence checks.
However, ultimately, if your application is self-contained, it will always be crackable. If you can build it so that it uses services you provide, than you can probably command it's use.
To paraphrase a Mr Jeff Atwood, it is better to make it easier for your customer to pay you than it is to crack your app. In other words, I think you are attacking the wrong problem. Make buying your product REALLY easy and then your customers won't feel they need to go to the effort of cracking it.
I would have a look at the backlash from the game Spore before deciding on a licensing scheme. They had it phone home, and only allowed so-many installations, etc. etc. etc. Spore was supposed to be their "Killer App" and it really had a hard time simply because of the licensing. You say you are willing to have fewer sales than see people using it for free, but you may want to be careful what you ask for. I was really looking forward to spore (and so were my children) but I never did buy it because of the DRM scheme.
No matter what you do, it'll be cracked in very short order especially if the program really is worth anything.
If you do go with a licensing scheme, make it simple and usable so you are not punishing those that have actually paid for your software. Also, I would avoid any phone-home style checks, that way your customers will be able to continue to use the software even if you don't want to keep paying for that domain 3 years from now.
I see a specific weakness in your example, besides the comment most people already put in that DRM is hard(impossible) to implement and often simple to circumvent.
In your second point:
If everything is fine, the server
returns some crucial missing parts of
the program bound to that certain pc
along with the usage limit of say 2
days
This 2 (or X) days limit will most likely be extremely simple to circumvent, this would just a few minutes to find and patch (crack).
If you really want to have a DRM model the only reasonable way to go is to put at significant part of the application as a web service and require constant connection from the users.
Before you try any of this, be sure to read Exploiting Software and you will think twice before trying to do DRM.
I think, given the context, the most effective form of protection for now would be the limited demo/license key approach: it would give people time to fall in love with your application so that they are willing to pay for it, yet prevent casual copying.
Once you know that your app hit it big, and that crackers provably siphon off a significant portion of your possible earnings, then you can still add additional checks.
Another thing to consider is where your app is going to be used: if it's something people would put on the their laptops to use on the go, network connectivity is not a given.
That is some of the harshest DRM I've ever heard of, your users would hate it.
Also, keep in mind that there are a lot of good Java decompilers out there due to the nature of the language and someone determined enough could just find areas of the program dealing with your DRM and bypass/disable it then recompile it (according to this a recompilation would be unrealistic)... so you would even have to go out of your way to implement your code as complex as possible to prevent a hacker from being successful. (Which could be done with one of those code obfuscation tools they may have out there.)
As long as it's an Internet application, you could restrict it in that manner. Short of cracking the program, this would work fine except for replay attacks.
For example, if I can capture the traffic that is going to your server, and simply replay it back to my program each time, I'm still good. For example, I could create my own "web server" and ensure the program hits that instead of your server.
You should read "Surreptitious Software" from Collberg and Nagra. This book is really good to help you understand how software protection mechanisms work (such as Code obfuscation, watermarking, birthmarking, etc...).
As lorenzog said, total security doesn't exist and software security is like a constant race between software vendors and pirates.
You should use cheap obfuscating transformations (so the overhead they incur isn't killing the performances) to prevent as many attackers (remember most of them are script kiddies) as possible to "steal" your killer algorithms or any secret data.
If you're willing to push the security further you can birthmark your algorithms and watermark your copies in order to find who leaked your creation. But even if you do, this doesn't mean your software is 100% secured. Plus the time you'll spend adding these mechanisms might not be worth the effort.
These concepts are really well explained in the book I mentioned before which is worth reading.
If I had enough reputation points, I'd vote this question down. Commercial software protection is a waste of time, money, and effort for many reasons. Concentrate on making a piece of software worth buying. If your software is popular enough to maintain wide seeding by pirates, you're probably successful enough at that point that you won't even worry about piracy. Anyway, crackers crack software protection mostly for fun. The stronger your protection, the better the challenge it presents and the more they want to crack it. Your best effort will cost you thousands, take months, and be cracked in only days.
My friend and I are planning to build a simple chat client to let people in a (physical, real world) room chat with each other (people chatting over the same wifi network, possibly pinging some external server to organize things by the external IP address of the wifi network). Partly we planned this as a chance to play around with Groovy, which we haven't done much with. But then I thought - damn, how many people have the Java 1.5 runtime? Maybe this is kind of thing where Flash would be better (when I say "Flash" I mean "Flex")? I hate ActionScript and I have very little experience with it, and I've no real interest in using it, but I'm thinking, if we want 9 out of 10 of our friends to be able to use our software, Java is possibly not the way to go?
My concern is in particular with the demographic we have in mind, which will tend to be freelancers and artists and individuals, rather than people at work. I'm aware that Java still has a decent overall market share, but I'm under the impression that its use is heavily concentrated in the computers that people use at work. Folks who don't work at corporations may not have a modern runtime?
I then decided to look up Java market share. It is surprisingly hard to track down info about specific JREs.
There was this on stackOverflow, but its focus is on RIAs, which isn't what I'm talking about:
What's all this business about Flash, Flex, Adobe Air, Java FX and Silverlight?
And then conversations like this make it sound like Flash is the only reasonable choice to make if you want people to be able to use your software without jumping through a lot of hoops:
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=317749&tstart=0
This seemed like a reasonable summary of Java versus Flash issues:
Client Java vs (Adobe) Flash for web applications, what to choose and when
I found it surprisingly hard to track down actual market share data on particular JREs. And I found no easy way to find out if folks who with modern JREs installed are mostly using their computers at work.
So I'm open to hearing some anecdotal information here. If we built our simple chat client in Groovy/Swing, would our target demographic be able to use it? Is Flash the only reliable way to go here?
If portability is your goal, why not go for a JS only approach, perhaps using one of the COMET styles of push? Here's an article to learn more:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/comet-a-new-approach-to-ajax-applications
If a JS RIA isn't what your after. Then Flash/Flex are your next best bet. I'm usually biased towards Java as a technology, but based on your target app and audience I think you'll get more joy using a Flash-based technology.
Adobe understand RIAs better than Sun, which was kinda demonstrated by some high profile Java 2D devs moving to Adobe in 2008/09. Plus with recent Flash Player developments you'll get your app onto more mobile devices.
Obviously server-side in Java ;-)
I'm trying to learn Java but it just seem like there are too many parts to put together.
You have JSP, Java EE, Java SE, Java ME etc....
I can get Netbeans to do basic but just taking a peek at spring framework it seem like a lot of work to get it to run in the ide from the numerous configuration .
I want to get into web programming and maybe mobile.
Any advice?
Another programming language?
Is java this complex or does it get easier?
Java as a language is certainly not too complicated. J2EE in its entirety is only just about feasible for a one-man team - but you rarely need the whole of J2EE.
It's perfectly reasonable for a one-man team to implement a medium-sized web application. I'm not saying one person could write GMail on their own, but you shouldn't be too scared of the technology stack - find the bits you actually need and concentrate on those. On the other hand, that in itself takes a fair amount of experience - I wouldn't really want to be starting off on an enterprise app (even a small one) on my own as a newcomer to Java.
Start small. Learn the core (the language, IO, collections) - and then start with small projects. Work out whether you want to be in mobile, desktop, server or whatever - don't try all of them simultaneously. Gradually you'll build up your experience.
It's not that Java-the-language is complex, it's that vast libraries and frameworks exist that can help you do your work. This is true for many programming languages. Look at CPAN for Perl, for example. What language to use depends in great part on what your goals are.
You can start simple and work your way up to larger and larger projects.
Java is by no means too complex for a one-man operation, but learning any form of full-formed web programming is a lot to learn when it's all new. If you were looking at .NET for the same purpose, there is a lot there too.
Unless you are doing huge-enterprise applications, ignore all of J2EE except for JSP and JMS and a very few other components. The lion's share of J2EE is only useful in the context of an enterprise application that needs to scale, and in fact can be harmful when used in smaller applications.
The frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Apache-*, Web Services, and so on help you do your job, but are yet more things to learn to do your job. There is a lot to learn.
Should you use Java? Well, quite a lot of development is done with LAMP (or WAMP): Linux (or Windows) + Apache-HTTPD + MySQL + PHP. With this, you don't need to worry about Java or .NET or any of those frameworks. LAMP/WAMP works very well for a wide class of applications.
Java and .NET on the server are (sort of) more appropriate for larger services, but once you are familiar with them, they work just fine for smaller services as well.
You have to decide what your exact goals are, then look at how people have implemented the kind of thing that you're looking at doing. This will help you figure out what technologies are the most necessary for the niches you're looking at going into.
Java -- the language -- is one of the simplest strongly typed languages in existence. Vastly simpler than C++ or even its close cousin C#, I would argue.
The standard APIs/libraries really are huge, but nobody learns the whole thing. You're suffering from the intimidation all beginners feel when they look at something that big and new, but this will pass as you just do stuff. First, you need to learn the standard utility stuff -- the collections in java.util, mostly -- and then, for basic web dev, probably next the JDBC library and Java Servlets and JSP. And that's it.
As an alternate tact here...
Another problem you will encounter in Java is Choice. You have a LOT of it in terms of frameworks and technologies etc.
My best advice is search around for about a day if you're so inclined to find what technologies attract you, or who's arguments sway you. Then, pick one. ANY one. Really, it doesn't matter, especially for a first project. They all have learning curves, they all have strengths and weaknesses, they all have fans and foes.
The key though, is once you have chosen, STICK WITH IT. You will inevitably stumble upon some problem, you will pose this problem to someone else, someplace else, and they will say "oh, you should have used QED instead of KnifeForkSpoon". And you will second guess yourself, go off and hear about the wonders of QED, and all of the kittens born under it and hungry children fed by it. If you succumb to that siren song of "greener grass", your project will flail. (Not fail, flail.)
Don't be wooed, don't fall for it. Just fix your problem and move on. At the end, and you're on a new project, THEN go and look for the more bestest greatness silver bullet.
As an aside, if I were just getting in to web programming today in Java, I would humbly offer this simple recipe:
JSP 2.0 with JSTL for markup and presentation
Stripes or Struts 2 for logic (note Struts 2 (TWO), Struts 1 is plain evil)
"raw" JDBC with a database pool for persistence
Tomcat or Glassfish for a container (tomcat more popular, GF easier to use out of the box)
Netbeans or Eclipse (NB is easier to use out of the box)
This uses the most fundamental, yet functional facilities for web apps in Java today, lots of applicability, and solves the major issues of a web app without covering them up with thick, impenetrable layers.
You will learn a lot using these "crude" tools.
You need to learn to pick your battles. Covering the whole J2EE is a massive task and, for most, unnecessary to begin with. I think a common mistake for beginner programmers is that they think they need to learn everything. You'll find your time much more productive if you focus on the core language constructs to begin with, and focus on either web or mobile programming.
You'll be extremely surprised (and pleased) at how much you can carry over from one area to the next. Once you know the language, the different libraries for different platforms are just tools...Stick with Java. It is a good language to learn.
Can I take "get into web programming" to mean that you're just learning web programming in general? If that's true, if you have the time you might consider setting Java aside temporarily and giving LAMP/WAMP a closer look as Eddie suggested. (Though I'd personally use Perl instead of PHP. PHP is sexier resume fodder and lets you do some very cool things on the front end, but in my experience, when it comes to writing server-side code Perl simply blows PHP's doors off. And I've heard that the HTML::Mason extension puts Perl on pretty even footing with PHP's front-end niftiness, but I haven't used it myself.)
I've made a living writing writing web apps in Java and web apps in Perl. I'm fond of both languages, but as a learning tool, I'd put Perl well ahead of Java. As you're finding out, Java's a bulky bastich. Part of that is, as others have mentioned, a function of Java being a mature language with a variety of extensions that are unlikely to apply to your immediate needs. But even stripped down, you'll still need to deal with quite a bit of overhead before you can even get your first "Hello World" web app to run. Comparatively, you'll get rolling much quicker with Perl.
(In fact, Java tends to be pretty verbose in general compared with other languages. That's not necessarily a bad thing; my one big complaint with Perl is you often encounter code that leverages various shortcuts and side effects to do an unholy ton of work in just a few lines. This code is often brilliant, elegant, compact, and utterly bloody unintelligible to a non-expert. Terseness is not a virtue for the poor idiot who has to modify code six months after it was written -- especially when you wind up being the poor idiot in question.)
And as a way of learning web programming, Java's sophistication can actually work against it. As a professional, I'm glad Java's web-based tools automagically take care of a lot of grunt work for me, like session management. But I didn't completely understand what it was doing until I was thrown into a Perl-only environment and had to deal with all that stuff myself.
I guess it depends on why you're doing this and how much time you can devote to it. If time is limited and you're looking for something that will appeal to prospective employers, then yeah, Java's an excellent choice, and you've gotten some solid advice in this thread about how to get started using it.
But if you do have the time, I highly recommend giving old-school Perl/CGI programming a sniff. It ain't a particularly marketable skillset anymore, but you'll learn things worth knowing.
You don't have to learn all of Java and its libraries. Just learn what you need for the job at hand. You will find there are plenty of options, but you don't have to get the best option every time.
If your base programming concepts are clear no
language should be difficult for you. I have switched over from vb 6 to java to c# to objective c now. What really makes a coders life easy is the IDE, debugging tools, documentation and lot of blog posts which google can search :-) regarding one man team my personal view is I am at my best when left to code and research alone with the help of google and stack overflow ofcourse :-) so I do think in programming large sized teams often lead to more screw ups than results
Java is not a complex language, altough it looks frightening at first.
I started learning Java from home, not a school, at 15 years of age (yes, yes, I know that's nothing to brag about) trough a book. It's a norwegian book, so I won't link to amazon;)
After reading/hacking trough half the book I found out I was better off ditching the book and looking for more stuff online. Google really IS awesome!
I would often read about all the fancy features of the JVM, frameworks, third-party libraries, JSRs and so on, and how much better my life would be with them all, but I just ignored them all. Yes I tried, but found it too confusing to learn Java and a framework that wasn't really necessary, at the same time.
Some people gave me hell for not using insertRandomLibraryName() or insertFancyFrameworkName(), and told me all about how much time and effort i would save, but I'm glad I didn't listen.
Now times have changed, and I still learn new things, or easier ways to do old things, every day. And I'm glad I took the time to learn the language itself before all the fancy stuff.
Also, don't use a notepad for writing code, use an IDE from the beginning. The only one I've ever really used is NetBeans, so that's the only thing I can recommend, but I sure am really happy with it!
As to Java SE, ME and EE, start with SE, and you'll propably find that it's enough for now. You don't have to use EE to write for the web, SE is fully capable of webernet stuff;D