I received the following e-mail from one of the JUG contacts I e-mailed this weekend. Yikes!
If you are moving to South Florida in hopes of finding a job ...well, this may the worst location in the county for that. I would say 1/3 of the user group is employed 1/3 are students and 1/3 or even more have been laid off and looking for other ways of making a living -- many hope through Java or some other technology. All in all, this is an incredibly tough tech market right now.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the folks that attend the Denver JUG are unemployed too. My highest attendence record was when I was looking for a new gig.
Personally, I think the debate between Struts and WebWork is irrelevant. This is because I don't think that the Web Application frameworks are the problem. I spend most of my days getting persistence to work. Granted it's gotten a whole lot easier with Hibernate, but I've spent a lot of time tackling that learning curve in the last couple of months. Thanks to Dave Johnson and Gavin King for guiding me up the curve. I spend about 30 minutes each day writing Struts-related code, if that. More time is spent writing tests, CSS, JavaScript (the most time) and DAO's/Managers.
So the problem is my brain. If I could just get the damn thing to work right - it wouldn't matter which framework I chose, because I'd just know it. No learning curve == awesome productivity.
The WebWork guys claim to have this. Therefore, I'm interested. However, who's hiring WebWork gurus? Heh - I know - what I really need to do is learn WebWork and then I can offer an unbiased opinion. Right now, no one is offering an unbiased opinion. Patrick is heavily invested in Struts, as am I. Heck, I've written a chapter about it and I've used it on many project. Jason is invested in WebWork as he's a committer.
Baaah, I'm just gonna learn .NET - that's where the Florida Jobs are. Struts .NET and WebWork .NET - maybe I should work on getting those started. ;-) The post is meant to be read with a smile on your face - I don't want to start yet another flame war.
Gavin King has posted an interesting comparison between Hibernate's Query Language and ODMG's OQL Specification. This might be interesting if you're familiar with OQL. For me, I know SQL and using HQL is so similar to SQL that I hardly even know I'm writing it most of the time. I think HQL will become a de facto standard in the coming years. Does JDO use OQL? Is anyone even using JDO?! It's strange because the only Java projects I'm familiar with (or hear about) are the ones from Java Bloggers - and everyone seems to be migrating to Hibernate. Good idea IMO!
According to MacRumors.com, Apple should be releasing JDK 1.4.1 Final today. I sure hope so. The latest release (Developer Preview 10) has been working fairly well for me. Then again, I only do server-side Java, so I'm sure my perspective is skewed. My fingers are crossed.
