Yes and yes.

I work in a small office with three other developers on an internal data analysis desktop application.

Are you contracted to do this application or is it a full time job? Why do you need three developers? Are you located in north america? Do you get paid salary? hourly?

(if you would rather now answer certain questions thats fine)

Why do you spend so much time on daniweb helping people like myself?

It is a full-time job and the ongoing expansion of business lines, data acquisition technology, and customer requirements has kept four developers busy for over five years. It does not show any signs of abating soon.

>Why do you spend so much time on daniweb helping people like myself?
I enjoy it.

Cool, sounds rather interesting. I really appreciate you answering my questions. I wish I could just pick your brain all day. I have one more question for you.

A friend of mine who has a lot of programming experience told me that I should learn to write parsers using only regular expressions. I am very confused on what this means. He told me once I can do that I would use it alot.

Could you explain what he ment by a parser in regular expressions? Maybe an example too would help.

A parser is an application that scans through text data and extracts certain pieces of information. Regular expressions are useful for that because they are extremely flexible in defining patterns for matching against that data and specifying what information is gathered when a match occurs.

You can read through a couple of tutorials on them here if you like:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutor...gex/index.html
http://www.regular-expressions.info/java.html

I'm an intern right now for a fairly large company - they gave me a job offer so I'll be working full time next year. I've been talking a lot to people at my company, and learning about a lot of technology currently used in industry, so I'd be glad to answer any questions you have about those types of things. Salary and benefits are very good, but they vary a lot from company to company. You'll find that companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc are offering a lot of positions and great wages these days. IT is not suffering in the US economy like most fields. Oh, and yes, I'm a Java developer and I'm currently using Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). I'm working for Booz Allen Hamilton (if you look it up it will say its a consulting firm - its actually difficult to summarize what BAH does without telling you about a lot of the projects, (info I don't know the vast majority of) but basically, BAH finds solutions to technical problems - how they can be improved - and implements those solutions. And interns (and full time employees) at BAH work from the office, but have a lot of leeway with hours and things. For example, a full time employee only has to average 40 hours a month, not necessarily 8 a day. And with permissions of a manager, employees can work from home temporarily. I know of some employees who work from home permanently but they aren't programmers so I couldn't say whether this is allowed or not - I would guess not (you have to have a lot of contact with your team to share and gain knowledge and meet project requirements). Hope that is helpful. One more thing -- if you want to work for a large company that does a lot of Department of Defense work or US government work, you might need a US security clearance.

Thats cool. I live in Canada. What can I expect in terms of salary/wages for internships in my later years of my degree. How much do you actually use from your university...what kind of university experience do you have?

What do you mean by experience... major? Next year I'll be a senior but when I got my internship, I was a Junior. The majority of programming I've done at school has been done in Java, but the courses have been fairly intense and focus on different things from class to class - in other words, they aren't Java classes, they are classes focused on specific things that use Java while learning those things. And what money you can expect really depends on what company you join and what your goals are. You can get an internship as a sophomore (do it!) and get the same wages as a junior in the same internship. I've seen internship wages ranging from $7-$20+ hourly. The big companies pay mostly around 17-25. I don't really know about smaller companies, I only really interviewed with a few big ones before getting and accepting an offer, at which point I stopped interviewing.

Ah thats really cool. I will be applying for internships next spring. Most of my courses are based on programming and math.

The projects you work on, what would be a typical task that you would be asked to do? Are the projects similar difficulty as to the ones you would be doing for classes?