I've filled out the application forms today and got in touch with the school to find out how to pay. Tomorrow I'll pay for it and it will be official. I'm very excited about taking it.
I told them I'd do lots of practice work at home since I'm not a seasoned Java programmer. I've finally set a date for myself to finish my new site. I have to have it done before the course starts Jan 9 2006. I've got it all planned out and am now slowly making use of the stuff I've learned over the past 4 months. I started with the domain model, then wrote the domain objects. Now I'm mapping the objects to database tables using Hibernate. Once I'm done that, I'll build DAO objects that make use of Hibernate and the domain objects. My business tier will be done (yes for my personal site it will be fairly small and simple). Then I can wire up the DAO's using Spring and expose them as JSF managed beans. Finally I will program the GUI using JSF. Last Feburary I designed a pure XHTML and CSS layout and I will finally be able to make use of it.
The course will take me beyond that and get right into EJBs, web services, JMS, Struts, JSF, and a ton more stuff I can't remember. It will show me and give me experience working with everything on my wishlist. If I would have bought a book for each thing I wanted to learn it would probably take me a year to read them all and more time to practice with them.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
