This week eleven coworkers and myself will be in Java training for most of the time, I haven’t touched Java since 2001. I did a bunch of research over the 4 day weekend to get a little head start.

I installed Netbeans and Eclipse to see how they are different

I played around with Tapestry and took a look at Struts

I used JUnit to write a couple of tests

I installed Maven and used that to bring down the sample Tapestry project

I installed and configured HyperSQL (with sa and blank password… ouch!!!)

It seems to me that there are a whole lot of things that I need to know, twelve years ago none of this stuff existed. I also seems to me that the language itself hasn’t changed so much compared to C#. I might also take a look at Scala down the road, some of that stuff seems interesting.

When I used Java in 2000 and 2001 it was primarily to do JSP development. The main project at that time was converting a ColdFusion site to JSP. The IDE that we used at that time was Kawa, we also gave Visual Cafe a spin. I must say that the IDE is much much better than what existed twelve years ago. Eclipse has a robust plugin system and computers have advanced in speed over the past twelve years so that Java apps don’t feels slow on the desktop anymore

Over the next five days, I will blog about what I did and learned, I will also probably put some stuff on our wiki so that I can have it as a reference/cheat sheet

Here is my question to you…..What are some of your favorite resources for Java and the Java ecosystem? I am looking for blogs to subscribe to, people to follow on twitter, if you have a favorite Java book then tell me about it. My favorite books from 2001 were Core Java, Volume I and II, I am happy to see that the 9th edition is coming out on December 10th: Core Java Volume I–Fundamentals (9th Edition) (Core Series). If you know of any good podcasts then tell me about those as well