Switching to Java at work

So at my day job I have always used PHP for back-end work. But I am happy so say that I finally get to expand into Java for some things! I know that Java as a language is not the hottest thing anymore, but I think it is really good for me to move away from PHP.

Transition away

We already have a network server written in Java: the "ATP Client" and now we are expanding to at least one more Java system and maybe another. My coworker and I are building a reporting system in Java. It is rather boring and complex but I'm happy to be moving into a "real" language because PHP just can't deal with the things we want to do.

PHP is the worst environment to do background processing. We want Reports and a few other things to run in the background, so we have to bring in something better. Pretty much everything is better than PHP.

Outlook

I'm glad that we are introducing more Java into the project. Currently, the report server runs inside Tomcat so that we can communicate with it over HTTP. There is talk of bringing in RabbitMQ, and I really hope it happens. Then we can drop Tomcat and just communicate with the report server on the message queue. That will be cleaner, I think.

Eventually I think we will have to re-write all of the web back-end, and I hope we get to do that in a language other than PHP also. I think Groovy or Python would be a great fit for us. We can keep coding without worrying about types or defining our data structures with classes, and we will have better access to background processing.

Dev notes

We are using Netbeans to develop or new java code. The boss, who wrote the current Java network server, doesn't use a full IDE for development. He uses UEEditor I think. It's like a super-powered version of Notepad++. I like Netbeans a lot and it has been pretty smooth. I love that now I can setup unit tests and easily run them.