Java Track?

Ive seen that treehouse is looking for a java teacher so I assume that means they plan on releasing a java track/course. In the meantime you could do the Android Track to get some java experience if you havent already

Thanks for the quick reply bro. Wow--- 17K pts. is quite an achievement! If you don't mind my asking--- did you start off as a novice, or were you already familiar with programming?

I spoke to Ben Jakuben and he informed me that they were/are in the process of hiring a full time Java instructor. Perhaps he would be the person to ask about this as well because I believe that he really is the Java instructor at the moment and probably has a roadmap in regards to all of that.

1- Focusing the course as a backend web server language like PHP and Ruby would be much more intensive in the amount of material needed to be covered before a student was able to produce an actual web application.

2- Swing would be interesting but isn't a cutting-edge technology and the future of it is uncertain therefore investing in creating tutorials to cover it would be rather questionable on whether it was the most valuable choice for the student's time.

3- The site hasn't shown much interest in covering desktop applications as it seems the site's roots and specialty stems from web development/web design and I wonder if the addition of the other tracks was ever included in the roadmap when the company started.

4- JavaFX is/has been in the past and present received negative criticism as well as skepticism to the most recent releases due to initial versions of the product and as a result recieved little to no adoption into mainstream web applications and desktop applications (desktop applications are receiving more use than web however)

Please note however that I absolutely love JavaFX and it would be awesome if they did cover that here!

To cut my rant short I believe you will be seeing more Java "courses" but I doubt you will see a Java track. I'd imagine the Python track is being brought on because they have plans to extend it with courses involving the Flask framework and/or Django.

The bottom line is that Java for backend web development is a different beast than PHP, Rails, and Flask. It is much more in-depth and much more complicated in regards to attaining the skills necessary to "see results".

Both your answers were helpful/informative. I'm an EE student who's taken a few classes in C/C++ ; I hear a lot of scuttlebutt about employers wanting Java programmers. But I can see how it'd be difficult to render that sort of knowledge in this environment… and more importantly (as you mentioned, Chris) it's probably not really part of TH's mission.

Thanks all for chiming in! We are in the process of hiring a Java teacher and can't wait to bring someone on board. It will be a full-fledged track that will likely cover Java for web and desktop apps after a solid overview of the programming language itself. I have some opinions on the shape of the track but ultimately the direction will be set by who we hire based on her or his expertise.

It's great to hear student feedback about what you'd like to see covered. Our goal will be to cast a wide net to make students ready for as many Java development jobs as possible. (It'll also be a great primer for Android!)

Ben Jakuben That would be awesome. I think that if you go that route I'll be able to stick around on this site a bit longer due to it complimenting my academic requirements.

I think the Android framework is good to focus on for students who were taught a lot of their computer science classes with core Java as the tool for learning the concepts as you end up already having the object oriented design mind set off the bat and already know a lot of the api when trying to have an advantage in the job market using Java as one of your resume keywords as opposed to Spring/Struts/JavaEE developers. It seems that for those jobs it is no problem for the companies to require 8, 10, 12 years of experience for a lot of those jobs because it is not hard for them to find that kind of experience which is the exact opposite of Android development jobs where since it is still such a new technology they aren't able to ask for more than 2.5 years.

I've actually been seeing a lot of Android development jobs experience requirements dipping as low as 6 months - 1 year of experience with Android development with "2 years of any development experience" tacked on.

I was actually looking online yesterday trying to see if I could find anywhere you'd mentioned your plans for the Android track in the form of a road map of some sort. However I couldn't find anything. Do you happen to have anything like that or perhaps have an idea what will be covered next? I'd love to see a unit testing course using JUnit for Android. I saw that the iOS track had a unit testing course and it made me wonder what was next for Android. Thanks!