
“This is my favorite "Hello World" how-to of all time” - ivom2gi
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546540497724907520
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rst
I'm no fan of Java EE, but a "hello, world" Rails app would have a similarly
complicated walkthrough if "rails new" made you choose which subsystems to
include, and the tutorial described what each choice meant. (And if it also
covered setting up and configuring the author's editor of choice.)

Just about any software development environmment (including JS in a web
browser) is ferociously complex by the standards of, say, the 1980s. The
messiness of a "getting started" guide for an app framework has more to do
with the quality of the packaging than anything else.

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krylon
I remember a couple of years back, when I was between jobs, I decided learning
Java EE might improve my chances in the job market. I found a PDF book called
"The Java EE Tutorial" (originally published by Addison-Wesley, don't remember
the author(s)) on Sun's web site and fetched it.

I first was kind of shocked that a book with the word "Tutorial" in the title
had about 1100 pages. What really made me walk away, though, was the freaking
_flow chart_ that accompanied the book's table of contents, showing how the
reader should work his or her way through the book depending on prior
knowledge.

There are probably situations where Java EE is the way to go, but those are
probably the kind of situations where your application is going to be so huge
and complex that the bloat and complexity of Java EE is not going to make much
of a difference.

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vinodkd
J2EE is a monstrosity, but this also highlights the point that we should stop
using Hello World as an example for everything.

Enterprise software is inherently about "big" systems - for some definition of
big. Using Hello world as an exemplar only sets up a strawman ripe for
ridicule.

That said, the J2EE community does have a somewhat larger commonly known
sample app - the Petstore - which ended up being a way to beat up J2EE more or
less.

~~~
spacemanmatt
J2EE has a lot of moving parts, for better or worse. I totally agree that
calling a framework tutorial Hello World sets the wrong expectation.

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vortico
"...we hope that now you have an impression of how to develop Java EE
applications in IntelliJ IDEA."

We sure do now!

~~~
ivom2gi
I guess the tooling in this case is about as good as it gets - independent of
the tools used, writing Java EE "by the spec" has traditionally been painful
independent of the IDE used.

