Java for Web Developers Courseware?

brentlaminack asks: "I've been asked by a local college continuing education department to put together a series of professional development courses on web programming in Java. Clearly, there are lots of books out there on Java, but what would you recommend for a professional development course? The material should have good examples, meaningful exercises, (an underrated and very difficult part of putting together courses) and not be 2000 pages or $500 per copy. The material should also cover some Object Oriented architecture and design patterns. As to which web framework... I'm open to suggestions on that as well. After all the smoke clears, I'll try to summarize the responses on my journal."

Comments

Book recommendation

[desNotes]

I recommend Fundamentals of OOP and Data Structures in Java published by Cambridge Unviersity Press. It is used in an introductory course on classial data structures used in Java. This book was (and may still be) used in OOP introductory classes utilizing Java instead of the historical use of Pascal.

I found it to be a good learning tool. While I have met one of the authors, I am in no way affliated with him or the book. This is just my pesonal opinion.

Re:*sigh*

[aprilsound]

This idea of specialized training in programming had got to go. If they know how to program and read standards, that's all they need to know in order to grasp the entire concept.

I wouldn't say that this is necessarily the way for a "continuing education" course to be taught. Fundamentals can take a year or two to teach. The submitter didn't give a whole lot of context, but I'm guessing this is perhaps a course at a community college (low cost, outsider putting materials together, etc.)

Since it must be in Java appropriate topics might include:

• EJB3/ORM
• The MVC Pattern
• Component based frameworks (e.g. JSF)
• AOP, IoC (i.e. Spring or Seam or some such), although its not just a web programming topic, you can't avoid it.

While we're on the subject of JSF, I should plug Facelets, which vastly simplifies the view side of things.

Your biggest concern will be having enough time for the students to get their head around whatever framework you do choose. Using Java for a small application is like sandblasting a soup cracker (to quote the bard). You could really spend a whole course on one part of the MVC.

Two things:

[SanityInAnarchy]

1.) Does it really have to be Java? I know that's what they asked for, but always be aware of the alternatives. If you think Java sucks for web development, tell them so up front, it'll save you embarassment when some kid says "I had a few minutes of free time at the end of the assignment, so I redid it in Rails."

2.) Whatever you end up doing -- and I know some professors that don't use a book at all, by the way -- make sure at least one of the development environments you use is entirely free (as in beer). Open source is better, but at the very least, they should be free. The last thing you want to do to them is add software licensing to the long list of expenses they'll face coming out of college. Big, expensive tools are fine, so long as they can at least cope with free products, even if the free ones are inferior.

Re:Two things:

[An Onerous Coward]

You should be able to do the entire course in open source tools. Apache Tomcat for the web server, Eclipse for the dev environment, SubClipse to get everyone on the source control bandwagon. The only thing missing is Open Source Java.

Having said that, I wonder what the target audience is for this class. EJB strikes me as massive overkill for all but a tiny handful of projects. 90% of the time (at least), I would guess that all the conceptual complexities it brings don't really provide any long-term benefits. Same goes for JSP: while it's interesting to have created a programming language that validates as XML, it feels clunky and I don't see the real benefit.

I recently started with a new employer, primarily on the strength of a Rails project I did for them for my senior project. I'm still convinced that Rails is highly suited for the stuff they're doing right now, whereas the EJB tech they're using seems highly suited for deploying to the enormous server farms that they hope to need in the future.

I'm not looking to start a flame war here. Everyone has some emotional investment in the technology they've already learned, me included. I'm just looking for feedback on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches to creating web sites and services.

This may help

[Krishna Dagli]

OCW@MIT: Java Preparation
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-092January--IAP--2006/Course Home/index.htm

OCW@MIT: Software Engineering for Web Applications
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index .htm

Webcast@Berkeley: With real video and/or MP3 : Data Structures
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978271

Web development using XML:
http://cscie153.dce.harvard.edu/

The way I learned

[Parham]

Assuming that the students already have a somewhat firm knowledge of Java, then all they need to be taught is how to set up a Tomcat server and how a tomcat server works (paths and such). Then simply refer them to the HttpServlet class. I think learning how the server runs and how it handles files is a lot more difficult than writing the actual code.

SafariU

[Edward Teach]

Look at SafariU. You can create custom books from O'Reilly and several other publishers.

Don't forget security

[Sven Tuerpe]

Security is a must for Web developers. There is a set of typical mistakes that are frequently made in Web applications, and most of them are not fixed automagically by using Java. Fortunately plenty of resources are available on the Net:

• The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) maintains a list of the Top Ten Most Critical Web Application Security Vulnerabilities and a Guide to Building Secure Web Applications. They also provide WebGoat, an application with typical vulnerabilities, for training purposes, and WebScarab, an interactive proxy for security analysis and general debugging. Both are Java applications, WebScarab running standalone and WebGoat in a Servlet container like Tomcat.
• The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) publishes the Web Security Threat Classification, which is similar to the OWASP Top Ten, and other articles.

Make sure your developers read and understand this.

Stripes: Good web framework for teaching

[professionalGeek]

You might like to consider Stripes as the web framework for the course. One individual recently switched to using it to teach a masters level course in Java web development (at a university in Nice, France).

On the plus side it:
    - Has comprehensive and easy to follow documentation
    - Is much simpler to grasp for new developers than Struts, JSF etc.
    - Is more OO than most MVC web frameworks, without forcing a component model on you
    - Doesn't require gobs of XML (or other) configuration

Suggestion

[metamatic]

Personally, I thought Java for the Web with Servlets, JSP, and EJB by Budi Kurniawan, New Riders publishing, was really good.

It goes through J2EE systematically, is clear, and has good examples.

I wouldn't introduce frameworks of any kind until you've done the basics of J2EE. Otherwise, you're introducing people to a solution before they know what the problem is.

Also, most frameworks seem to me to be not worth (a) the pain of learning them and (b) the added dependency risks. They do things which simply aren't that hard to do.

Struts is my favorite example. Visit the web site and they throw a ton of complex crap at you, without ever answering the simple question "What compelling problems does this solve?"

What you don't know that you know

[kanly]

Having just been through this with a friend of mine, who has decades of OO experience in desktop programming, beware of prerequisites that you don't realize they need:

• Sockets, Ports, Packets. Until you get across the idea that all internet applications communicate through bytestreams, and standard protocols, not much will make sense. Most programmers either haven't used RPC at all, or have used something like COM to do it, not TCP/IP.
• Multithreading. The idea is still alien to a lot of folks, even people well-versed in Java. They just know that they have to be careful when they call Swing, but not why. Writing web apps, you must have at least an inkling of what thread safety is, and when to synchronize. A brief comment about deadlocks wouldn't be amiss.
• Permissions. Some people have mentioned security - that only covers the basic part. Teach your students to always consider "What is this {class|person|request|application} allowed to do?" There are lots of things that you can do in a desktop application, including Java, that won't fly under tomcat running in Security Mode. "I just asked for the user's home directory, how come my app won't run anymore?"

If you get any one of these wrong, your web app is doomed to failure. These are tough concepts for some, but they aren't optional.