[meekins]

Enterprise Java guy here. I guess Java is not much discussed here since it's most popular in corporate scenarios - and it's not very sexy nor fun. I mean, even though it's my first language and the platform I know the best, whenever I do some coding in my spare time I'd rather hack something together in Ruby.

Java is the Cobol of the future so there should be plenty of job opportunities on that platform in the foreseeable future. Big IT service companies doing custom enterprise apps have however moved most of the development work offshore (India or Eastern Europe) at least here in Northern Europe but there's plenty of opportunities for more senior developers and architects.

Despite all that boilerplate and complex application servers Java EE is actually quite nice for distributed enterprise apps with complex integration requirements. So if corporate environment doesn't turn you off and you want to get started with Java EE, I'd suggest in addition to core Java you take a look at EJB3, JPA and CDI. JAX-RS is nice for REST. If you want to write your front-end in Java, take a look at JSF (and some "rich" component library like PrimeFaces) instead of JSP. Servlets are the technology behind there so it's "good to know".

Spring framework was very popular before EJB3 and JPA, and still remains popular in contexts where you don't have/need an EJB container. But if you know you are targeting a full Java EE app server most of the neat features offered by Spring are also available in vanilla Java EE.