Keeping in line with the post about why companies use JSP, etc… I am interviewing with a company that uses these technologies. I have a second interview this week and they know that I have no experience in the technologies but do have a wealth of background in the industry they are in and the underlying data technologies.
I’d like to show them that I can be a quick study and at least understand how the various technologies work from a high level and how they work together.
I have J2SE 1.5 experience from a console application level.
The technologies are JBoss, JSP/JSEE/JSF, NetBeans, Hibernate, as well as XSL and SOAP. I know it’s a big order but I’d love to show my interest by possibly surprising them with knowledge I assume they know I don’t have.
I’ve seen the Apache Org tutorials but they wander all over the place. You can grab a link and head off into another direction.
I was amazed that the JBoss site didn’t even have a statement that said “JBoss is…” it assumed you knew what Java application server meant
You should also consider picking up:
Design Patterns
Domain Driven Design
Understanding objects and object oriented programming (OOP) is just as important as knowing the technology.
I couldn’t find the a link explaining it, but I’ve heard numerous times throughout my career that only 10% of the people that state they are object oriented programmers actually follow the most basic tenets of OOP.
Well, try not to reveal the weaknesses until they ask. Why stab yourself w/ a knife? Also, don’t say more than what you can swallow. This is a gamble but depending on who you interview with it may be “against” you about introducing new technology. If you’re interviewing for new project then latest skill is very crucial. However, if you’re going for stable project that’s in maintainance mode then they may not want someone w/ bright ideas.
I suppose the answer depends on your role…anyway, here’s a few quick definitions.
JBoss - Java application server - An application is a program, in Java’s case, a simple web ‘program’ is made up of one or more Servlets and one or more user interfaces (JSP, JSF, etc). An application server is itself a program that resides on the Server hardware - a computer somewhere in the world which is connected to the internet that has been tasked with the responsibility of ‘Server’ in the Client/Server paradigm.
As an example, Sitepoint is a PHP ‘program’ running on a PHP App Server.
JSP/JSF - The user interface, interacts with the application, may contain elements of XSL, SOAP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript (et al) in addition to JSTL and outright Java code (though, putting uncut code directly into a JSP is generally frowned upon). The interface should be pretty but dumb, the heavy lifting is done by the Servlets. The software ‘Client’ portion of Client/Server (your computer being the hardware Client).
NetBeans - One of many Java Integrated Development Environments (IDE), abstractly, a ‘word processor’ for writing code. (don’t repeat that, they’ll laugh at you)
Hibernate - A wonderful tool that, once the rather steep learning curve has been climbed, greatly simplifies interaction between an application and a database.
JSEE - Java 2 Enterprise Edition - The ‘advanced’ library - Our main concern?: contains the classes that make up Servlets.
NetBeans - One of many Java Integrated Development Environments (IDE), abstractly, a ‘word processor’ for writing code. (don’t repeat that, they’ll laugh at you)
I used to tell this to my non technical friends, except it was Eclipse and I said it was like MS Word for Java. Although you should probably avoid saying that in a job interview.
Otherwise Rushiku’s summaries of each technology is pretty good. These are fairly complex things that will take a while to learn. You can read up on them to prepare yourself for an interview but don’t expect to be able to answer too many technical questions. I find often the web sites for these technologies often provide too much information when you just want a brief summary of what they do. Anyway, best of luck with the interview.