Learning Java

[Phoenix CG]

Salaaam

can someone tell me the benefits of learnign java for web apps?

I want to start learning a language which can make web applications properly, for next generation websites, I want to research what will be web 3.0, what is the best language to learn for developing web applications?

[nami]

What kind of applications do you want to make? Google seem to be doing some amazing stuff with serverside programming and javascript!!!

Java is good, but it means your users have to have the java runtime installed on their computer. The advantage of java is that it is a cross platform language.

Disadvantage of java is that if your app is big, it can take time to download before the user can use it.

With java you make proper apps, with serverside programming and javascript, they are not really applications, but mearly mirrors and smoke, i.e. they use techniques to get webpages to appear to be applications.

With java you more or less make an exe and embed it into a web page...

[Phoenix CG]

well in short I want to develop a type of online OS (just styled) much like facebook but mixed with a bit of blogspot, but I don't want it to appear like a normal webpage, but something that is part of the office environment, something people use to collaborate together etc.

[nami]

You will definately need a client side language like java for something like that. I would be surprised if you could do something like that with a serverside language. But does java have api's which allow you do connect to office?

[Mace]

I assume you are talking about using Java on the server side, right?

Not Java on the client (browser) side. Java on the client side (applets) for web applications is pretty much dead at this point.

But Java on the server side is definitely the standard for most large scale enterprise web applications. You have really great industrial strength application platforms like JBoss, Websphere, Weblogic. You have great J/EE frameworks. You have Java APIs for most enterprise services like transaction management, document management, authentication and authorization, etc. (The other popular option is of course the whole MS stack)

And you have proven development environments and debugging frameworks as well.

We use the Google Web Toolkit to produce the client side javascript for most of our applications from Java code as well. And then of course most our server code is Java, with some Ruby (Rails) and Python and C++ mixed in.

Legally, nobody can tell you what Google uses for their work. But it doesn't take much to guess that they didn't build GWT for no reason.

[Mace]

well in short I want to develop a type of online OS (just styled) much like facebook but mixed with a bit of blogspot, but I don't want it to appear like a normal webpage, but something that is part of the office environment, something people use to collaborate together etc.

The interface of that is going to involve a fair amount of client side code.

But you will also need a lot of server side services to manage storage, authentication, search and other services to support it.

So you'll need an architecture to solve both sides.

[nami]

I've done something similar, i.e. getting my webapp to interact with a database and the office application on the users computer and with a network drive.

here is a screenshot. had to blur some stuff...