Java Technology Is Pretty new to me

I have to admit that as a Java EE developer I came in pretty late in the game. Considering that I wrote my first line of Java code less than 1 year ago on my home computer that I had been using to develop small business web-apps. I'd been trying to get a job writing C# for companies around Oklahoma City, but was coming up empty handed and noticed that there were a lot of Java jobs that I wasn't applying for (mainly because the closest I ever came to Java was a paper I wrote in college comparing Java to C++). So one day I decided to buy a Java book (Java 2 Complete, Sybex) and wrote my first "Hello World!" program in Java.

I can't say I got started writing code in my bedroom as a young lad. No, admittedly I actually tried convincing myself that writing code wasn't for me and I wanted to be a wire monkey and do some networking. But one day in my last semester I was taking Software Engineering at SOSU and something just clicked in my head. We had one major project to complete over the course of the semester. An online candy machine. Real basic. A catalog of 6 choices of candy, shopping cart functionality, you know typical simple online app. Well, everything we did in the way of actual locical, business programming was C++ since the professor didn't have time to introduce any other language and C++ was the only language really covered. I decided after a little research and talking with a friend that C++ wasn't really a good language to use when writing a simple web app. So I decided to do a little research in a language called PHP and I was hooked. I wrote my candy store in PHP with a MySQL database. At that point I decided that writing software was a good path for me.

So I started writing web apps in PHP. Then I started dabbling in ASP and from there I got into C# by way of ASP.NET and I thought I wanted to write C# software, but since the job market was pretty tapped in this area.... and here we are full circle.

So now I've immersed myself in Java and Java related technologies. Now maybe someday I'll be a programmer.

Until next time.
Les