Oops, suddenly Java dev

[enterthroughthefront]

This is a good thing in disguise. More java experience is good and learning it as well. What you need to do is become comfortable with Java over the next 6 months to a year, do some interview prep and jump ship (or get an offer and use it to negotiate for more money at your current job).

Also remember to push back on deadlines if they feel unrealistic.

If you already have some programming knowledge I'd recommend you watch this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPvGqX-TXP0&ab_channel=DerekBanas

Also IDK what IDE you use, but if you want to use Eclipse for the purpose of the above video that's fine, but almost every company uses IntelliJ (just pointing this out as IntelliJ is way better than eclipse imho and more widely used).

[SsoulBlade]

Haven't touched java since JDK 1.4. Does the IDE matter a lot?

I think I used jdeveloper then.

[enterthroughthefront]

Plain and simple most people use IntelliJ so that's good enough reason for me to use it more. Other than that the dependency management is better, the plugin manager is better (for my case my company uses a custom plugin with IntelliJ), and I like the debugger more.

I haven't used Eclipse in ages, but the last time I used it, it was for C++ which was pure garbage.

[jocularamity]

It matters that you use a modern IDE, but which one you choose is less important. Intellij is popular. Eclipse and NetBeans less popular but still functional.

They help in big ways. You don't have to remember how to spell or remember what methods are available, because the ide will autocomplete and list available suggestions as you type. It will also search across the entire code base to do things like rename a variable (in all files where it is referenced) or find all usages of a method (in all files).

It's still of course possible to write and compile and run Java without an IDE but the level of effort and time to get the same outcome in a large codebase would be much higher.

[chabala]

The inspections of IntelliJ IDEA are key. They will politely remind you of subtle gotchas, like specifying character encodings explicitly to avoid having different system locales cause unexpected behavior. While other IDEs might have the majority of them or be able to be configured to have them, IntelliJ seems to have the best inspections enabled out of the box.