Java as an Industrial-Strength Development Language

Numerous tomes chronicle the emergence of Java onto the technology landscape. Suffice it to say, things have not been quite the same since James Gosling (the visionary behind Java's birth at Sun Microsystems) created Sun's first Java applet running in a Mosaic-clone Web browser.

Java has grown immensely since that time and gone through many upgrades and enhancements, including sizeable replacements of major components within Java (the Swing graphics library), along with the advent of enterprise-level Java commitment in the form of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). This book focuses on the most recent release of the Java Development Kit, JDK 1.3—more affectionately called Java 2.0. In addition, both JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans will be used extensively to implement most of the Java components, and bean-managed and container-managed persistence using the EJB 2.0 specification will be used with commercial application servers.

Java as a career path has also turned out to be a smart decision. Studies have revealed that a majority of job postings in the U.S. market include Java experience as a requirement over other programming languages. In fact, a recent study by the Forrester research firm reported that 79 percent of all Fortune 1000 companies were deploying enterprise Java applications. Forrester also predicted that that figure will be 100 percent by the end of the year 2003.