Agylen

I didn’t notice, but looks like last Friday marked the 10th anniversary of the birth of the Java language. I should have really paid more attention, as for me Java was a very important part of my working life in the last ten years. Here is my personal timeline:

1995 - Java announced but not much more than a curiosity.

1996 - I start off with Java by reading David Flanagan’s Java in a Nutshell.

1997 - Java Servlet Developers Kit released. I realize that developing web apps with servlets is much easier than with CGI Perl scripts.

1998 - Java2 platform shipped. Now we’re getting serious! Also include Swing, which is much better than AWT.

1999 - I start doing some work with Apache Cocoon. Sure beats doing out.print(”“), but actually I had already discovered XSL-T and used it with a self-made framework.

2000 - I start reading about EJB, thinking that sooner or later I’ll be using this very cool technology. Five years later, EJB is out of fashion and I still haven’t developed a single application using it.

2001 - Cocoon 2.0 released. Big improvement over Cocoon 1.

2002 - Not much happening this year.

2003 - Cocoon 2.1 released. I start using Hibernate to develop database applications. Bye bye, straight JDBC!

2004 - Dependency Injection-based containers are all the rage and I start using Spring together with Cocoon and Hibernate. A very powerful combination.