turncoat

[Steve Peters]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 02:28:55PM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote:
> With the dearth of any interesting Perl jobs out there, I'm thinking  
> that I should probably retrain in something that people are actually  
> hiring for. A quick poke around Jobserve indicates that Java jobs pay  
> enough coin that I can afford to take loads of time off to hack on  
> interesting Perl stuff.
> 
> The main downside is that my Java knowledge is basically stuck in  
> 1998. I know the core language, have written web applets, mobile  
> phone applications, daemons, but it's all Java 1.1 style. I hear  
> they've added one or two new features to Java since :)
> 
> So... I'm going to wander into Foyles to stock up on books to get me  
> back up to speed. Assume I'm
> a competent Perl 5 and Java 1.1 developer. Which books come  
> recommended to drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century?

If its available in the UK, "Just Java 2" by van der Linden is an excellent
text and reference.  Its one of the few Java books I keep on the desktop.

> Should I be looking at Struts, or something else? Swing looks useful  
> (or at least seems to suck less hard than AWT), is it? Where did they  
> hide LWP[0]? XML::Simple? Data::Dumper? WWW::Mechanize? etc..?

Struts is somewhat on the outs, although since it was the only thing for
quite some time, knowing it is useful.  Spring is damn handy and helps to
take the pain out of Java.  Hibernate is helpful too (the Class::DBI/DBIx::Class)
of Java).  

Unfortunately, there is no handy equivolent of XML::Simple.  The Jakarta
Commons Digester probably comes closest (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/digester/)
although you have to do most of the work yourself.  Cactus is the 
testing equivoltent of WWW::Mechanize (http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/).  
I don't know a good example of Data::Dumper, but I suggest getting friendly
with Eclipse and its debugger.  

Steve Peters
steve at fisharerojo.org