97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 1. All You Need Is Java

Anders Norås

While working on the first major revision of Visual Studio, the team at Microsoft introduced the world to three developer personas: Mort, Elvis, and Einstein. 

Mort was the opportunistic developer, doing quick fixes and making things up as he went along. Elvis was the pragmatic programmer, building solutions for the ages while learning on the job. Einstein was the paranoid programmer, obsessed with designing the most efficient solution and figuring everything out before writing his code.

On the Java side of the religious divide of programming languages, we laughed at Morts, and we wanted to be Einsteins building frameworks to make sure the Elvises wrote their code the “right way.”

This was the dawn of the age of the frameworks, and unless you were proficient with the latest, greatest object relational mapper and inversion of control framework, you weren’t a proper Java programmer. Libraries grew into frameworks with prescripted architectures. And as these frameworks became technology ecosystems, many of us forgot about the little language that could—Java.

Java is a great language and its class library has something for every occasion. Need to work with files? java.nio’s got you covered. Databases? java.sql is the place to go. Almost every Java distribution even sports a full-blown HTTP server, even if you have to climb off the Java-named ...