Java landscape back then

Back then we often had Sachin versus Gilchrist debate over a super-chilled beer on a Friday evening! Can you now guess which years I might be referring to?

Using vi editor to code in Java, with Java documentation open in a Internet Explorer or Netscape browser for reference, Websphere for application server hosting the application with EJBs, especially stateless session beans, and debugging with SOPs was great learning and very satisfying. Those long days, late nights or even night-outs in office was something I thought was the norm then. This is a story about early 2000s.

Java itself was relatively new and I had Java 2 — The Complete Reference which mainly had all java APIs documented — more than concepts. So, I didn’t quite like the book. Second book I bought was Khalid Mughal which I think is still going strong. But I liked Kathy Sierra — which was famous for SCJP certification. Effective Java by Joshua Bloch was another book I read. Much later when Java 8 was released there came Java Concurrency in Practice which is still a must read after some many Java releases (of course Java is backward compatible).

JSP and Servlets were commonly used with custom MVC architecture for web development. Custom MVC because Struts was not yet used widely — at least it was not used in our project. It was later around 2004 that it was fairly accepted.