Types of applications that can be built with Java

The first time I actually heard about Java and did something with it was in high school. The most complex program we had to write was to read a sentence from the command line and print how many vowels were in it.

Over the years, I started hearing about Java being platform independent, and portable, and so awesome that it was probably used in my toaster as well. Hmm... Okay.

Fast forward a few years, I start my full time job and I hear about this thing called Java EE that is used to make software that entire companies use. Now I don’t know much about how businesses run. But I was pretty sure they need something way more complex than counting vowels in a sentence on the command line. Maybe a toaster can get away with just knowing how to count vowels, but not entire businesses!

Unfortunately, my day-to-day work did not involve any interaction with Java, so I never quite understood how things work.

Very recently, when I decided to learn a bit more about Java from Sander Mak’s course on Pluralsight - Modern Java: The Big Picture, I finally got a big picture view of the different things Java was capable of (apart from, of course, counting the number of vowels in a sentence).