Ideas for J2EE project

DamoKen

Ok, not looking for help with getting a final year project started or anything. I've over 10 years industry experience mainly in java but the last 4 years I've worked with two large multinationals on very large products so went down the product knowledge route.

Anywho got laid off on Friday, so I've decided rather than look straight away for something similiar to brush up and learn new areas I'd be interested in.

Just looking for any general ideas for a project to do at home. Find I pick up on new tech much quicker when I'm working on a product idea rather than tutorials. Final aim I suppose would be to showcase what I've done in interviews.

Lot of experience designing etc and FDLC. Skill areas I need to brush up on would be EJB3 which I haven't used before, last time I did work in EJB it was at EJB2.0.

So looking to come up with some type of web based system, browser interface and deployed on an enterprise server. Thinking I'll deploy to each of JBoss, Weblogic & Websphere eventually to brush up on my knowledge there as haven't used any of them in the last 4/5 years.

front end tech I'd like to learn would be JSF plus struts, I know JSF is meant to be the next evolutionary step up from struts but would like to try both for comparisions. Usual additional stuff like CSS etc for presentation. Any additional stuff to recommend for frontend appreciated.

Server side EJB3, look into alternatives like Spring as well. Also check out Hibernate compared to EJB3's persistence API which if I recollect correctly (almost 2 years since I read a bit on it) Hibernate makes use the persistence API? could be wrong there.

Will also be looking to publish a few simple web services. Last worked with them in their infancy so any recommendations for new api's etc for rapid deployment again appreciated.

Will probably use something like Rose to design, any newer/better apps for this?

IDE will be Eclipse, used plain ole Eclipse plus MyEclipse & Ganymede in the past. Downloaded the Galileo flavour this time around, looks interesting.

For building and deployment will probably stick with Ant which I'm very familiar with, might also take a look at Maven, possibly Cruise Control, also heard great things about Hudson.

SCM I'll probably just go with CVS or SVN, something lighweight with nice Eclipse plugins.

Anyway very vague I know. Just looking for ideas for something to get the brain working again plus learn new technologies I just didn't really have the time or opportunity to look at until now. Is there any online resource with project proposals plus requirements that anyone knows of or something like that? Wishful thinking I know

Any other new developments worth looking at would be happy to hear about it.

Cheers

Civilian_Target

One thing you might have missed out on if you're been out of action the last 5 or 6 years is patterns. Another thing you might have missed out on is the heightened interest in web security.

So one project I'd suggest you check out (literally, they have an open SVN) is OWASP Webgoat. It's a J2EE training framework that shows security flaws in Web Applications by example.

Idleater

i'd recommend going straight to ejb3 and take a look at richfaces and seam. Loads of documentation and tutorials out there and it won't break your heart trying to remember but the crappy plumbing code for older ejb stuff.
All will work nicely on jboss (5).

DamoKen

cheers for the replies guys. Spent the day setting up JBoss 5 and discovering a lot of the sample stuff didn't exist or jsf libs were missing etc. Exciting day anyway, finally got a simple jsf ejb3 sample ear running and hitting off an Oracle & HSQLDB db (to an extent).

I agree on the EJB3 stuff, from the small amount I've read on it, it seems to have simplified to a large extent deployment descriptors, interfaces etc necessary to get a successful deployment, getting rid of a lot of the clumsy old way of doing things. I've noticed though from looking through job specs on monster that there seems to be a greater demand for Spring. As I have a fairly extensive knowledge of EJB1 & 2 I'm going to have a look into Spring for the moment and how it can be used with Hibernate bypassing EJB architecture altogether.

Might do a bit of mix and match with the spring modules eventually, i.e use combinations of Spring/JSF/EJB3/Hibernate to get an appreciation of the different approaches.

Still want to catch up with EJB3, but may have an interview or two lined up in the next week which focus more on the open source stuff.

As far as design patterns go, yeah I've used them on and off over the years, harder to use when you're working on projects that have been going on for years but always looked into what would be the best fit when I was designing from the ground up. I'll definitely be using them again anyway and checking for anything new there.

Think I'll start with something simple like an online timesheet system. Start with just Spring/Hibernate and then see how easy/hard it is to swap modules using different tech in and out.

Cheers guys

marco_polo

The java petstore was always a classic starting off point. You'll almost find examples of the Kitchen sink in there.

http://java.sun.com/developer/releases/petstore/