More Opinions Needed on Direction of IT Development

[bper123]

Hi,

I've gone from low-level development through C, C++, Java to web development technologies and frameworks.

Web development seems to be making the biggest noise these days.

What I'm hearing about are approaches such as Ajax, Spring, Hibernate, etc. There's also the on-going debate of .Net vs. J2EE.

My questions are what are the hottest areas of IT development these days? Is it still Web development for Java or are there other hot development opportunities for Java developers? If the web's the rage, is Bill Gates pulling ahead with .Net?

Thanks.

 

[mmorancbt]

I live in the .NET space but I see opportunities in both frequently. However, I know many developers who move easily between both - so perhaps let the current market opportunities dictate and you can keep your eyes and ears open on the other direction.

The fact is, most good developers maintain a few technologies in their toolkit.

For now, the .NET work and the new version of VS2005 I just installed will dictate where I spend my time.

Matthew Moran (career blog and podcast below)
Career Advice with Attitude for the IT Pro

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/career

http://techcareerconsult.blogspot.com

 

[mrn]

RFID looks to be big in the next couple of years.

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."

http://www.airport-parking-site.co.uk/

 

[jshurst]

I think that web development is absolutely the hottest thing out there right now. Everything is going to the web. You mentioned AJAX above, which basically makes a website behave like a Desktop application. Most of the application that we write at work are web based applications. The world wants to be connected and what better way? The framework is already there.

I also work with the .NET framework and I don't think it's going anywhere. ATLAS will be coming out soon too so hopefully AJAX development will become a little easier. From what I hear java is a lot like C# so you could probably pick that up pretty quickly. I'm not saying that you want to move away from java, but I see tons of .NET positions available right now.

Also make sure to know a little bit of XML and check into web services.

 

[grande]

As a student that's learned Java at school, it was ridiculously easy to pick up C# on my co-op. If you know one, you can learn the other in a few days/hours.

-------------------------
Call me barely Impressive Captain.

 

[johnherman]

Why not consider getting into the data end, maybe not DBA but database programming (triggers, stored procedures, etc)? I noticed about 15 years ago that the front-end interface was almost continually changing, but behind the scenes, the data was always there, and skills such as data administration, modeling, aggregation, quality, integration, etc were always in need.

-------------------------
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was - Steven Wright

 

[prosper]

I would say C# is a lot like Java.