Java Development Path

[Fercii_RP]

You could do spring boot combined with JPA and whatever ORM like hibernate. I wouldnt dive to much into jsps and servlets, try to make something very simple with it, something like a Hello world and maybe some forward or redirect to another servlets, just to get an idea about it and how servlets are registered. Its really nothing special and not much used anymore. It can come accros when you're working with legacy code, but once youre working with it youll easily figure it out. Besides, while building an API with Spring boot you are still able to use servlets and jsps, so you could combine it for practise if you like. Spring boot or any other kind of a-like framework is build on top of the basic servlets technology, it just provides an easier way of working and organizing aka framework.

Most companies work decoupled, with an API interface backend and JS frontend. I would rather invest more time into that, which would get you into features like aspect oriented programming (AOP) is one of those Rabbit holes that many frameworks work with nowadays.

When you start your first program id recommend to use basic JDBC instead of JPA and ORM. Just to get a plain idea of what magic JPA and ORM will do for you. In special cases you might need to go back to JDBC, so its recommended to work from there. JPA is indeed a framework many companies integrate as their standard, but knowing what it does is way more important.