I am looking for some advice on what should I concentrate my efforts to get the needed skills to become a Java developer for Oracle applications. I'm bit confused as there are lot of technologies in the Java world. Where should I start? What to avoid? Is JDeveloper a good IDE for a beginner?
You're question is a little bit too vague in order to give a proper answer...
If you plan to query the Oracle Database from an External Java Program (Either within a Swing Application or an Application Server) then you need to learn 2 core APIs:
JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)
JPA (Java Persistence API)
JDBC is the core API that allows a Java Program to interact with any RDBMS so you should at least know how it works so whenever you have to dig into low-level code, you will actually know what's happening.
JPA is the latest Java API for Persistence which basically allows one to map Plain Old Java Object (AKA PoJo) to RDBMS Table Structures. There are multiple known implementation available but I would recommend Hibernate or TopLink as good starting points.
After that, you can start to dig into other known frameworks like the Spring Framework for some other RDBMS related APIs.
To become an Oracle Developer there is a bit more to learn than jdbc. You should take a look at the Oracle web site. It is kind of slow and not very intuitive but has a lot of good information. There are OUGs that have good info as well.
If you just want to access Oracle via JAVA then you should use a framework such as Spring. Takes away the pain of jdbc. Lets you write sql and map it to objects.
If you don't know PL/SQL it might be good to learn what it is.
My two cents from working with Oracle for the past 7 yrs.
You should be able to do everything related to Oracle using JDBC, so make sure you bone up on that API. Other than that, it depends on the type of application. Standalone apps may use Swing (the Java UI toolkit) or in the future JavaFX, which is supposed to make Swing obsolete and may do so in a few years. Web/enterprisey apps will make use of Java Enterprise Edition, so take a look at the servlet API, and if the app uses Enterprise JavaBeans, look at the Java Persistence API, which you would probably be using instead of JDBC.
I haven't used JDeveloper, but I haven't found anything wrong with the free IDEs like Eclipse or Netbeans, and my personal favorite is JetBrains's IntelliJ IDEA.
There's really nothing specific you need to learn to be an oracle devloper per se. Obviously you need to learn oracle sql syntax, and all the standard rdbms theory that goes along with database programming in general. The Java libs for database support are pretty easy to pick up and run with. I'm sure you can find a tutorial on the web by a quick google search.
As for IDE I'd recommend Eclipse. It's a bit cumbersome at times, but the number of plug-ins available is staggering, and it has great refactoring and code completion support.
Expert Oracle JDBC Programming is a book aimed directly at developers who want to use Java with Oracle. Before you make even that small monetary investment though, you might want to check out the JDBC tutorial published by Sun.
You can use JDeveloper and try to find some tutorials for it (I actually had some from my university). It integrates well with rest of Oracle stack (db and application server). Down site is that although you can download some developers editions to run for personal usage, running Oracle db + Oracle application server + JDeveloper on a machine that has less then 4GB of ram and one core is not really peasant experience.
Your question is very simple so I have listed a few simple steps to start developing a Java application using Oracle technologies.
Install Oracle XE Database.
Install [JDeveloper]. Choose the install with Weblogic if you are developing a J2EE application.
Build and run a jdbc application using the [sample code] or use the wizard in JDeveloper.
Install SQL Developer for writing stored procedures.
Steps 3. and 4. are optional. You now have everything you need to build either a proof of concept or an enterprise grade database application, using simple wizards and without re-inventing the wheel.
You mentioned developing an Oracle Application. It's best to leave the development of Oracle's packaged Application to Oracle itself but if you want to integrate your custom java application with Oracle's packaged application then use Oracle's SOA Suite.
Cheers
KB
Related
My company has a product that we sell as a solution to mediocre firms, they are ok with using java but they have different opinions on db due to licensing and other technical/resource issues.
I was wondering if there is a way i can create the app in such a way that during installation we configure the database (select weather mysql/oracle and input/generate connection strings, allocate driver, e.t.c.) and it works similarly as the other db. I have heard about hibernate being able to generate table but havent ever worked on it before.
I need an opinion and if possible reference to a guide. thank you in advanced. sorry for a stupid question, i only know basics of java, haven't yet worked on ORM or any other framework.
Yes,
The JPA (java persistance API) allows you to do what you're looking for. You will be needing a JPA provider (such as hibernate, Apache OpenJPA or eclipse link among others).
You will be able to automatically create the schema of your database according to the objects you need to map into it.
Here are few links to get started:
https://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/bnbpz.html
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jpa/
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/java/SettingUpJPA/SettingUpJPA.htm
Many JPA ressources will point to java ee ressources and tutorials, since it is heavily used with java entreprise edition, but the API itself can be used with the standard java platform.
I'm looking for good java MVC web application development kit (or framework), with servlet engine, database persistence layer and viewer layer included and ready to go? One example is TDK (Turbine Development Kit), but it's kinda outdated, and their M.E.T.A. is very hard to work with (it uses maven 1.0).
Thanks,
David
There's AppFuse and Roo if you're looking for "make it go".
If you're not dead-set on Java, there's Grails (and JRuby on Rails).
Give a shot to AppFuse. It will leverage either Struts 2 or Spring MVC for you, with a nice persistence layer.
There are many good 'stacks' that you could use, some of which have already been mentioned.
They all have their own strengths & weaknesses, and you really need to select a stack that best fits your requirements.
The Spring/Roo, AppFuse & Seam are all great, but they do come with a certain amount of... errm... bloat.
You may find that picking and mixing technologies actually provides you with a lighter weight and more performant solution, so long as the technologies you choose integrate relatively seamlessly.
If you're looking to package a full execution environment including the servlet engine as part of your application, Jetty is a good choice, and you can easily integrate it into a Maven build environment.
You may also want to investigate using HyperSQL for your database, which will allow you to prototype using an SQL compliant database without having to worry about installing a full database manager such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
I have a few questions to understand better Java's usage in context of web applications:-
Is Java EE web development suitable for small start-up (with less human resource) looking to develop an web application ?
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ?
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ?
Thank you
Generally the answer to the question of "what technology to use" is "the one which you have most experience with". However, Java EE is huge and clunky, and definitely not good for rapid prototyping, which you will be doing if you're doing a startup.
Personally I would recommend a more modern and dynamic environment. If you're coming from PHP, you should be able to pick up Ruby on Rails or Django (Python) easily. These two choices are in my opinion orders of magnitude better than Java EE. If you want to stick with Java, at least go with the Play framework then.
Is Java EE web development suitable for small start-up (with less human resource) looking to develop an web application ?
Yes, I worked in a startup where I was the only full time programmer.
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
The same as in any other web development shop. Of course, the problems have their Java flavor. For instance, one bug we discovered was caused by different minor version of JDK used on the live system than on our test system.
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ? Do not code the PHP way. Java's strength is OOP and its many libraries/ open source frameworks. Use that.
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
I don't know why you think that, but Java is used everywhere. It is one of the few languages that Google officially uses. They use PHP as well, but it has a "lower" status.
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ? Use Java's strong points which I mentioned above.
Updated after comment
I cannot make the choice for you. If you are in doubt and in a big hurry you should not go with Java. This is common sense. However, it is an opportunity for your team to learn and grow. Maybe there is a PHP/other client for Cassandra. I knew a former PHP programmer in a startup, who switched to Java. Not saying anything bad about PHP programmers in general, but he did all kinds of strange things, such as not leveraging the power of Java web frameworks and writing lots of procedural code mixed with HTML and SQL. Obviously there are lots of Java programmers who would do the same thing. The point is that your team will probably learn new ways to do things and benefit from it in the future.
Allow me to answer these from the perspectives of a developer/architect in a small start-up, experiencing a bunch of these issues.
What kind of difficulties may arise in Java EE web development, deployment & maintenance ?
How do you decide on which toolset/framework to use? Do you need an IDE? Which version control system and why? Do you want to develop at some place and deploy somewhere else, or develop directly on the server? Do you buy a linux box for this, or rent some cloud? How much do they cost, in terms of licenses and training?
What kind of things should be kept in mind/ considerations to be made when moving from PHP background to Java ?
How would your servlet send out an e-mail? It's much simpler in PHP. Need secure transfer of encrypted objects? Java is your friend. What about session tracking? Use cookies, or have a dedicated class do it? How do you access the database? Want to use hibernate? What other tools is hibernate dependent on? What are their costs (license+learning)? Can you use JDBC directly? What are the pros and cons? Which db to use to why.
Why Java web applications are not so popular today? ( or in case I perceived it wrongly, please list any major deployments beside linkedIn and ebay)
I am not sure if this is the case, but possible reasons could be the availability of .net and integration with C# based systems and Apple ditching Java from its SDK. But that is my speculation, don't quote me on it. I am developing a large scale system myself with Java 6.
and Finally, What are some of the most important things to learn before starting web development in Java EE ?
(This is my opinion) have a test or trial set up of the entire architecture. Is the GUI web-brower based? Is it an applet? Standalone application talking to a server? JNLP system downloading archives and JRE off the net? You will find some stuff do not work on Windows 7, some do not on Vista, W3C have deprecated the applet tag from HTML but Sun/Oracle asks you to use it, different browsers do not support contents of your style sheet, etc.
Firewall set up is another major challenge - you start using thread pooling using Spring libraries and your capabilities to use DBvisualizer to check on DB tables are gone! Now you need a DBA and a sys-admin to fix these who you do not have!
Personally I found the LAMP architecture (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) the fastest way to go for smaller applications, but if you need heavier guns for your app (security, GUI with swing, multithreading, etc), replace the P in LAMP with a tomcat container. The hardest thing I find is to judge the value of a tool in the context of my application - I do not need a tool that generates Java files with getter/setter methods given a list of variables - to me that is yet another level of indirection, but then JUnit in eclipse is helpful for debugging.
Just shared some of my thoughts - hope this helps, - M.S.
For a startup an interesting choice could be the Lift web framework, which is used for developing "Java Web Applications" (although in Scala).
I have came from another question to this one:
How can one start with Java (JVM) ecosystem? What are beginner, intermediate and advanced knowledge-bases (bags!)? To be honest Java ecosystem was always a bit confusing to me, so it would be very helpful to provide some "reference references" and "defacto tutorials" for learning (curve!) JVM.
Note: I want to use JVM with Scala (or Clojure) but not Java itself.
I am a C# developer (WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Web Services, ... like that).
The Java Tutorial is a good place to start.
Update: you have enough questions for about a dozen posts here ;-) Honestly, you should do some research yourself (Google is your friend), then ask more specific, targeted questions; that would yield better results. (e.g. I don't think anyone can answer your question regarding Swing or JavaFX without more specific details about what you are trying to achieve.) I try to give a few pointers below, about areas I know to some extent.
for servlets and other web frameworks, here is a bunch of tutorials.
Tomcat and Jetty are both application servers.
there are a lot of different web frameworks, because different people have differing preferences, ideas and style, so many have created their own framework. It can be confusing, but at least there is choice :-)
for persistence, apart from JDBC, ORM frameworks are another strong option. I use Hibernate and I can recommend it; in a bigger project it can make your life much easier. Ultimately it depends on your specific project and constraints; there is no single right choice.
AFAIK Java has no equivalent of LINQ.
See also this post for further recommendations.
Java based web applications need to run inside of a web container such as Jetty or Tomcat.
You build your app and deploy it to the container which hosts the application at runtime.
Pure/plain JDBC should only be used directly by simple applications or integration layers that do not have access to the class model.
Most applications that I have seen have used some kind of Object Relational Mapping framework which models the entities as classes at a higher level than plain old JDBC.
Popular O/R frameworks include:
hibernate
toplink
datanucleus
cayenne
For web based development, you could start with AppFuse, see the quickstart guide.
AppFuse is a templating system that generates the skeleton of an application for you.
Then look deeper into what has been generated, and see what frameworks they are using.
AppFuse lets you choose between different technology stacks, so you could compare.
I haven't seen AppFuse support for Guice or GWT.
Guice is a Dependency Injection framework, others that could be used instead are Spring or picocontainer.
Another investigative approach that you could try would be starting with AndroMDA, which is a model driven architecture framework - you start with a UML model and then generate or forward engineer a working application.
AndroMDA also lets you control the choice of the underlying framework implementations by configuring different cartridges, once again you should dig deeper to see what they are using in the generated application.
If you are looking for a basic introduction, then the Java Tutorials are nice. To do other things like Java Web Development, then your going to need to consult google for the respective technology since they vary so widely.
One book though that I highly recommend taking a look at is Java Concurrency in Practice
Yeah, it is almost impossible for new guys to get started. This is going to drive away a lot of developers, and Java is in danger of not having constant new bloods. The old farts would love that, it's great for career security, and that's why they are making Java more and more complicated.
I have thought of creating my first database application for one of my projects using Oracle and Java. I have chosen Netbeans as my development environment. I have a few questions to getting started.
This will be a data intensive (yet still for a college project) database application. I do not need 1000 user concurrency or any other very advanced features but basic stuff such as triggers, stored procedures etc. Will the 11g "Express" (XE) suffice for my requirements?
Do i need any Java to Oracle bridge (database connectivity driver eg. ODBC etc) for Netbeans to connect to the oracle database? If yes, what are they? Does Netbeans support Oracle databases natively?
Any easy to follow guide on how do I connect to the database and insert/retrieve/display data on a J2SE application? (I know that i should Google this but if there's any guide previously followed by anyone and is considered easy, it would be greatly appreciated.)
There are several different ways to access databases using Java. I'm assuming you are wanting to use JDBC, which is included in all recent JDK's. There are other layers on top of JDBC like Hibernate that may make things cleaner for larger applications, but may also be too steep a learning curve if you have a project to complete and submit.
To answer your questions in order:
I think it's highly likely that Oracle 10g Express Edition will do what you need for a college project. It's pretty much the 10g Standard Edition with a 4GB limit on data size.
You will need a JDBC driver to access the database from Java. It comes with XE, and is installed in <XE client install dir>/jdbc/lib/ojdbc14.jar
Sun have an introduction to JDBC here.