Starting a Career in Java Development

Starting a Java development career can be a great choice given the number of job openings that pop up day after day. Java has been around for a while, and there are a tremendous amount of companies that already have a Java system in place. This means that there are a lot of development opportunities.

Java is compiled, type-safe, and fast. I mean really fast! I have, myself, migrated a fairly complex project from Python to Java and another extremely complex system from .Net to Java. The main reasons were performance improvement and platform independence.

Learning Java in itself is not that difficult, but, in order to become job-ready and be able to develop real-world Java applications, it requires a fair amount of knowledge. In this post, we're gonna list the skills required for becoming a job-ready Java developer.

Core Java

Core Java or Java SE is the starting point of your Java development career. Many beginners think that once they learn Java SE, they are ready to develop real-world applications. This is not true. First of all, in order to be a good programmer, learning the syntax is not enough. You should learn how to design an application by using various constructs provided by the programming language. You need to master it by writing a lot of code and developing some projects, keeping the design principles in mind.

Java SE itself is not enough. A quite common application, produced with Java SE, would be to develop a command line application that has limited use. To get to the next level, you need to learn Java EE or Advanced Java.

Advanced Java

Java EE or Advanced Java supports the development of server-side backend web applications. While an understanding of Java EE concepts, like servlets, JSPs, and EJBs, is useful, you need not master this — just the idea should be sufficient.

The main reason for this is that developing any web application by simply using Java EE is difficult and time-consuming. There are a lot of frameworks available today that help in this development. Some of them include Spring , Spark Java , and Dropwizard .

These frameworks make web application development so easy that you don't even need to know about JSP and Servlets to develop a basic web application.

If you are not sure which framework you should use, go for Spring. Its the most widely used framework and has a very active community.

Testing

Testing is an integral part of software development. Writing automated unit tests helps the developer receive instant feedback on the code. Unfortunately, many developers consider tests as second-class citizens.

The de-facto for unit tests in Java is Junit . Junit is widely used and has a great community out there. I can't stress less on the importance of tests. You just need to master it.

Tools

Before you start with any framework, you must be familiar with some build tools and IDE that makes your job easy.

Build Tools

A Java application can consist of lots and lots of files, and one big project might be divided into smaller modules where one module is dependent on another. Apart from this, your code might be using some popular libraries, like Apache Commons , to solve some well-known problems that come with every project.

These dependencies need to be supplied from your development environment to a test environment and, then, to production. This can become a daunting task if done manually. To solve this problem, we use build tools, like Maven or Gradle .

If you are unsure of what to start with, choose Maven. It's the older of the two, has wide applications, good community support, and is easier for beginners.

IDE

An IDE or Integrated Development Environment helps you a lot. It saves you a lot of headache by providing features like a real-time compilation — you can see the compilation errors as you type, and there is no need to wait until actual compilation happens. An IDE provides type completion among other things.

There are a lot of IDEs available, but only two of them are really good. My preference is IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse.

I use the Ultimate edition of IntelliJ, which is I had to pay for, but there is a Community edition that is free. Eclipse is also a free IDE. There is another IDE called STS (Spring Tool Suite), which is essentially Eclipse with plugins for Spring development.

Git

Git is a distributed VCS (version control system). Every project uses one or the other VCS for source code management. Git keeps different versions of the source code files as you modify them and keeps track of changes, making code history a manageable task.

Server

A web application needs to be deployed on a server. There are several choices, like Tomcat, Jetty, and GlassFish. A beginner should start with Tomcat. It's really lightweight and easy to configure and use. However, if you are going to develop your first web application using Spring Boot, then, there is no need to worry about servers for a small project. Spring Boot allows you to use an embedded server.

Conclusion

In essence, if you want to get a job as a Java developer, you need to learn about Java development, along with the most popular frameworks and tools. Using a popular framework will increase your chances of employability. It will also be easier for you to learn.

Once you get a hold of Java SE, develop some small projects to get a grasp of the language. Then, start learning Spring Boot and Maven and use STS for development. Once you are familiar, you will be able to develop more and more web applications.

You might want to check out these resume polishing tips before applying. Good luck!