As open source software is becoming mainstream area of technology choices, there has been so many new technologies, frameworks, designs, standards that keep coming up. Seriously it is impossible for anyone to know everything and be well versed in it. If you are trying to do so then you will never be better in any of them. On the other hand keeping yourself updated is the only way to have a upper hand and be valuable to your organization and the industry. So how to handle it? The answer to this is you just need to know clearly what are the areas that you have to be up to date and to what extent you have to be up to date. The second part to the solution is important. When someone says that he/she knows a particularly technology what really matters is whether he/she knows the concept behind that technology. If one is good in the concept then it is matter of spending some time to really work on that technology. So keep yourself updated on whats happening in the industry and at the same time keep a cut-off of how much you want to learn about each and every new stuff that pops up. Be thorough in your specialization and only in that area go to a deeper extent.

The following are few sites you could look at or subscribe to, so that you get the updates by mail.

Sun - Java/J2EE
Artima - Weblog/Articles on Java/J2EE, C/C++, Ruby on Rails
Javalobby - Updates on whats happening in the Java/J2EE world
The ServerSide - Updates on whats happening in the Java/J2EE world
Ajaxian - Ajax and related technology updates
Technorati - Technical blog updates

The above were few sites that I could conjure up as I am writing this blog, but I will keep posting new or links that I might have missed at this time.

Continuting on my yesterday’s post on Harvested Frameworks, I read an interesting article in IBM developerWorks titled “Crossing borders: Exploring Active Record“. This is a good article by Bruce Tate comparing ROR’s active record vs J2EE based ORM Hibernate. In addition to it, also read Bill Venner’s blog post on “Code Generation: The Real Lesson of Rails” that refers to the same article but Bill posts his thoughts on it. Very interesting and I think there is definitely something to learn from ROR’s convention over configuration principle and the concept of dynamic code generation that Bill talks about. At Compassites we have few projects going on in ROR and we have realized how productive we were with those projects.