Hi everbody. After several attempts to learn J2EE , I'm finally reading the "J2EE Tutorial" from Sun's site. I'm not a Java newbie, I've been programming in Java for the past 4 years but always client-side and developing my own telephony server and call center (tens of lines of code running dozens of threads, database access, socket comunications, etc etc etc) so I'm extremely comfortable with J2SE and OOP.
In the meantime, this whole J2EE thing and "enterprise <whatever>" that I've neglected has become very trendy and fashionable so I wanted to finally become serious about learning it, but there's so much information and docs spread all over and I had a tough time making up my mind *where* to start. I hope the Tutorial is the best way to start. I downloaded the J2EE SDK which -- I understood -- has everything you need to develop, deploy, run, etc. but is not intended for commercial use... is that correct? I used Tomcat a little over a year ago to develop a couple of test JSP (I read a whole book on JSP and Servlets so I know some stuff already) and recently found out about JBoss which seems to be getting pretty popular.... The problem is that I dont completely understand how all these relate. From JBoss' site: "JBoss is an Open Source, standards-compliant, application server..." From Tomcat's site: "Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies" What exactly is an application server and why Tomcat isn't one? Or is it? Are they two different kinds of animals? Do they complement each other? Do they compete against each other? Do they overlap in some areas but not in others?? What should I use? My platform is RedHat 7.3/Apache1.3.23 So far I'm just learning and following the examples in the book using Sun's implementation, but after that what?? I'm also playing with JBuilder which I think will be my next Java IDE. JBuilder installs a couple of versions of Tomcat. I'm only talking about Tomcat and JBoss because they are the two free options I know of. Well, in sum, the whole J2EE thing is too confusing because there are too many points and aspects of it. Please *help* !!!!! I'd really appreciate your comments and directions in this jungle :-) BarZ To change your JDJList options, please visit: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm
