How to Become a Java Developer. The most commonly used tools

Want to become a Java Developer, but get lost in a huge amount of information? Continue reading to find out the path to get the relevant knowledge you need to achieve your goal.

To become a java developer the knowledge of the java programming language is not enough. Java is popular not only because of its rich features. The main benefit of java is a wide community and broad ecosystem. An enormous number of frameworks and tools make it possible for java to take its place in web development, data engineering, and Android applications. In this article, the path to becoming a java web developer is provided.

Java

The knowledge of Java SE ( Tutorial) is required. It is a basis for all further actions. It is important to know not only a java programming language itself but also the concepts of object-oriented programming, design patterns, and principles (e.g. SOLID, DRY, GRASP, DDD, etc).

Git

Writing a software application is a long process. I mean, the history of all your changes has to be kept. The software project can exist for several years written by many developers. Meaningful history makes it easier to understand previous challenges for each team member. Moreover, software source code is developed and supported by several people. As a result, they have to communicate in some way. A version control system takes this place in a software development process.

Git is the most popular nowadays and knowledge of it is required.

Version Control Repository

This is a continuation of the ideas of the previous section. Team members, who work on the same project, need the ability to share their changes. Version control repository hosting providers are used for this purpose.

The source code is located at the server. When a team member wants to apply changes to the repository, the pull request can be created. Pull request is a set of changes that are requested to be added to the common repository. According to the best practices code review is applied here. Other team members review the request, suggest making some changes, and add the changes to the common repository. As a result, all team members can use the new code.

Examples are Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket.

CI/CD

Continuous integration/Continuous delivery is an expected process of any project. It specifies the pipeline with various actions that can be specific to your application. The most commonly used steps are: running tests, checking code style, building the artifact (e.g. jar file), publishing the artifact into the shared repositories, deploying code changes into the environment, etc.

Jenkins and CircleCI are some examples.

Build Tool

Even the project with a few java classes has to be compiled to be used. Typical projects require a lot of additional actions such as dependency management, copying resources to a specific place, validating the code based on some rules, running tests, building a jar file, and pushing it into the remote repository, etc. This is the role of project management and build tools.

Maven and Gradle are commonly used. One of them has to be chosen.

RDBMS

The vast majority of applications are expected to save data in some form for further usage. The structure of the data is predefined beforehand. Knowledge of SQL is required.

There are a lot of various databases (RDBMS) such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MsSQL, etc. At the early stages, it is necessary to stick to any of them.

NoSQL

RDBMS is not effective in many cases. NoSQL databases are the compound term for the next categories: key-value store, document store, column-oriented database, and graph database.

Redis and MongoDB are examples of a wide range of NoSQL storage. At first, it is important to understand that data can be saved not only in RDBMS. The use case specifies the storage.

Spring Boot

Moving forward to enterprise applications it is important to use some framework that can simplify the development. The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of the control container for the Java platform. It has a huge ecosystem for a wide range of demands.

Spring Boot makes the development of the Sping applications much easier especially in the case of microservices.

Dropwizard is one of the alternatives. It is recommended to steak with Spring Boot because of its popularity.

Hibernate

Data manipulation is hard. Especially in a situation when the data are represented as java objects in comparison to RDBMS tables. Hibernate takes this niche. Hibernate is an object-relational mapping tool for the Java programming language. It provides a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a relational database.

In some cases, Hibernate can be an overhead for the project. In these situations, other tools can be used e.g. JOOQ or MyBatis.

Data structures and algorithms

At least basic knowledge of data structures and algorithms is required. Each business problem has its specifics, requirements, and limitations. Based on this information suitable data structures and algorithms should be used. In case of the wrong choice, a user experience can be fairly poor because of the performance.

Docker

Docker takes away repetitive, mundane configuration tasks and is used throughout the development lifecycle for fast, easy, and portable application development. It is often used in integration testing, development, and deployment of your application.

Summary

This is only a brief introduction to java development. A lot of other tools, frameworks, and practices are used on a daily basis of java application development.