Up until this point in my career I have only dealt with client (or desktop) programming. My initial, albeit overly optimistic, impression was that web programming was a simple enough technology that I could pick it up in a matter of hours if need be. Before I go any further let me give you a little background, I graduated college 3 years ago and started my professional career working for a research and development company that helped clients transform theoretical knowledge into software prototypes. Most of the development was done in Java with the occasional performance-centric work being completed in C. Towards the end of my time at my previous company I began to get curious about object relational mapping frameworks (a la Hibernate). After working with Hibernate for a few months I quickly began to appreciate the amount of work that goes into building enterprise systems. Coincidentally I had also started hunting for a new job so I thought it was an excellent opportunity to broaden my horizons and dive into enterprise development.
The choices for a web programmer (web programming does not include design related tasks) are limitless. Speaking from a Java perspective alone, there are a wide variety of frameworks and configurations to choose from when developing a new web application. In my new job I will initially be working with the Struts framework and the common controls presentation framework all running inside of the Tomcat web container. I spent the first few days sifting through the different point releases of the servlet specification and the struts framework trying to figure out how everything fit together. Needless to say it was overwhelming but the exploration quickly changed to challenging and enjoyable. So far the only real frustration I have encountered is there seems to be a serious gap in unit-testing solutions for struts based applications. Sure, a few exist but none seem to be as complete as I'd like.
I would encourage you to take the time to at least survey the enterprise landscape if you haven't done so already. Over the next few months I intend to update this blog with my impressions based on my journey and hope it will be useful information for developers following a similar path.
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