In addition to this, Webstorm (the IDE of the OP) also has great support for saving files with Linux line endings: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/webstorm/2016.1/handling-lf-and-crlf-line-endings.html . I personally like to keep autocrlf set to true (or maybe input ). With the rise of VM's, self hosting etc. you'll find it rare to be running your code on Windows. So I always prefer to keep my codebase in a Linux friendly state, hence the true .

Like everyone else has stated, we'd need a bit more information for being able to answer this with any concrete solutions. But let me try and split up your steps into something very basic so that you can get something together. Step 1: Database Start with a simple MySQL database. One table called user for storing users. It should have a unique identifier for each person. This could be a numeric ID but it could be many other things. If this was for a company, why not use their corporate email address for example? Another table called "attendance" with two columns (in a compound key) - user ID & time. Step 2: Barcode Reader Here's where things could get complicated. What's your barcode reader? How is it interfaced with? Is it unmanned so people are expected to place their card in the right place? Or is it manned by a security person who does the scanning? If you are doing this as a learning experience, here's what I'd recommend: use a mobile phone as the barcode reader . Most modern phones have cameras and there's a wealth of tutorials out there that teach you to write a phone app. For example, here's a tutorial for writing a QR code reader in Swift . QR codes being a type of barcode if you aren't familiar with them. That could take the information required & send it off somewhere... Step 3: Putting It All Together You'll finally need something to tie the data all together and do the reporting your after. How about a simple web service with a REST API? It would have one endpoint to take data from the phone/barcode reader and store it in the database. Another endpoint would then be needed to generate a report the user could access via a browser. If they want to print it, they use the browsers print functionality. And there you, that would be all the parts that are required. There's still plenty of questions to answer in there (e.g. security). But hopefully that's given you some food for thought. Good luck with it!

The problem for me is keeping up too. Say I'm creating a back end system and I think it'll be nice to implement a nice web based GUI on top of it. I know HTML and CSS and am quite capable of crafting something nice. So I take a look at what I need to get a quick HTML/CSS baseline in there with a CSS preprocessor. I want to make sure this GUI is modern enough that it's easy to maintain going forward. So I have a Google to see what I need. And most of the time it tells me I want... Yoeman for generating a starting point (although this is a one of) Bower to install my dependencies for me (but I only want JQuery!) Gulp to minify everything for me and launch a web server (but my IDE can do that) Babel to ensure my JS is up to scratch (but I'm just writing very basic event handlers!) And so on. Before I know it I've got this mismatch of tools that installs all kind of configuration files in my project & enforces a directory structure I don't really need either. I've often started done the route and thought, screw this. Downloaded the dependencies myself, compiled the CSS myself and been much happier! So the point of my waffle - if it's awkward enough for something experienced then yes - it's gone too far. It's fine for tinkering, side projects, quick prototypes etc. But for a stable product, you'd have to question if it's worth it at times.

Java web development has always been an interesting place. I'd agree with other comments about avoiding some of Java's own frameworks. I'm a much happier developer since I moved away from JSF. I always find it so far behind the state of the web (HTML5 support being one I always remember battling against). It's also so keen to make you produce stateful applications (hello @ConversationScoped ) going against the stateless, cloud native direction web development is heading in. I'd get them into some of the simple Java MVC frameworks to start off with. They could get something up & running with Spring Boot & Spring MVC for example. It will also help them learn what makes Java web development a power tool. Leave the view side of things to web technologies that can pace with the web, while having a real solid server base there to do some amazing things in your code. I mainly do things myself in Spring using Handlebars as the view templating (the lack of logic really helps you keep logic out your views). Other frameworks like JHipster also look like they are doing great jobs of bring modern Java development to the Java world.