I've been writing code using Java since 1998. That makes this my tenth anniversary of Java programming. I worked once upon a time with Metaphoria, a proprietary Java server framework heavy on RDF and co-branded syndication, around the turn of the millennium. The product was developed by some very cool people at Pencom Web Works including Leon Shklar, Dave Makower, and Evan Maloney. Although its origins pre-date the whole notion of J2EE, the code incorporated many ideas that eventually found their way into the J2EE spec including a templating service with a JSTL-like expression language. For a variety of reasons, it never really took off, but those of us who worked on Metaphoria learned a lot and most are still chugging away with Java server-side development.
As for me personally, I've worked with Websphere, Weblogic, JBoss, and Tomcat over the years. Most of my development experience has involved Struts with JSTL-driven JSP pages. Currently I'm working heavily with Hibernate/JPA and EJB3 in a JBoss environment. I recently took a class that covered JPA, EJB3, and Java Server Faces (JSF), which I'm now suddenly much more interested in than I was when JSF first arrived on the scene.
