Want to become J2EE developer

Question

Hi,
I am a Sun certified java programmer. In my current job i am using core java/c++ but no J2EE stuff. I have around 6 years of experience in telecom industry . It is my keen desire to become a J2EE developer but i don't understand which direction i should choose JSP/Servlet or EJB. I have no web programming experience. Can anybody help me to find the right direction to achieve my goal ? I will highly appreciate your help and support.
Thanks & Regards
Upabbi

Answer 1

Servlet/JSP/JDBC is by far the most common and
versatile.
EJB is very specialized and limited, and to the best
of my knowledge only used in big investment banks and
a handful of huge companies. ('A handful' is here
comparatively speaking, not literally.)
Not really. Most successful EJB projects are executed in those sectors (and in companies supplying them).
Many more companies though try and fail, often repeatedly.
Everyone wants to be "enterprise", and to many that means EJB (though it might be declining).
There's a massive misunderstanding here that EJB is all there is to J2EE, that everything else is not J2EE at all.
EJB is Enterprise, after all. Enterprise normally
means that it solves problems that only exist if you
have more than a million employees and 500
incompatible IT platforms. Nope. Anything corporate can be called "enterprise". In fact most really large companies have pretty well consolidated their IT efforts on a few platforms by now, with at most some others hanging on for dear life as legacy applications inherited from companies they acquired over time that haven't been replaced (yet).
Enterprise also means that it's massively expensive,
and noone outside the enterprise would touch it with
a 10-foot poker.
We're a rather small company (70ish people here, some 350 worldwide).
We're running several hundred servers, dozens of them with heavy EJB clusters.
On the upside, EJBs may pay better (more specialized
and big companies have tons of money). On the
downside, EJB skill is fairly useless anywhere else,
and on its own it's too narrow to base a career on.
IMHO.
It does however give you a foot in the door in a lot of places, even if you may end up burrying EJB projects and redoing them using other things :)
I would suggest that you first find the kind of job
you want, and then check what skills you need to get
one of those.
That IS good advise.
But webapp development is a fairly general skill that
can come in handy in many situations. I would suggest
starting with servlet/JSP/JDBC (or Ruby on Rails :)
whether or not you go for the EJB part.Certainly, though specialising on it in this environment of offshoring is dangerous precisely because it is a general skill and can thus be easily moved to say Bangladesh or Bulgaria.