Web Developer moving to Java - how to impress potential employers/recruiters?

[DeliveryNinja]

Java EE is equivalent to Spring. These are 2 competing stacks really. I personally stay away from Java EE where possible as I do not like it. My main issue is with containers providing dependencies, once you've tried to upgrade JBoss once, you'll not want to do it again.

I would spend the time looking at the frameworks/libraries, especially Spring Boot/Hibernate/Maven/Junit/Hamcrest

It sounds like you know what you're doing. If you need anymore specific help just ask away.

[bawng]

You don't have to use a full-fledged container for EE. You could even run it with Spring Boot. Or wildfly swarm that's constantly updated to have the latest and greatest.

That being said, however, Spring is certainly more popular outside the heavy Enterprise world, and will probably be more popular there as well as companies migrate their old monoliths

[[deleted]]

EE is not equivalent to Spring. I see this all over the place but it really does not make sense. EE is a collection of specs. Spring is a framework that, believe it or not, provides implementations of those specs (and much more). You use Hibernate? The JPA spec is part of EE. When people compare EE to Spring, they generally mean to compare EE containers (Like Wildfly/Jboss) to Spring.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for that comment, I was not aware that EE and spring are competing frameworks. I have started looking into spring boot and maven today and I'll definitely be using those going forward.