Taking the Java Plunge - release 1.0 reached

Well I made it. It was early in the weekend that the code was working, but its taken a couple more days of struggle to get it so I could put it into production. Learning how to get tomcat to authorize the users is hell to debug when it doesn’t seem to do what the book says it should.

Looking back at what I have done surprises me. It was a simple application (just 5 web pages) but the number of separate technologies that I had to learn (or in some cases perfect) were many. Here is a list (on top of Debian Unstable/Stable)

• download and conversion to debian package of sun sdk
• set up and configuration of Tomcat
• complilation of jk_mod from source
• installation and configuration of jk_mod into Apache2
• download, installation and use of Eclipse with Web Tools (including debugging)
• download, installation and use of git (and cogito) scm system
• Java Programming – with special attention having to be paid to the Collections classes
• download, installation of Tapestry web framework
• learning all of the Tapestry concepts (basic, forms with translaors and application state objects in particular)
• download, installation of iBatis database framework
• learning the use of iBatis concepts (with complex joins and how they populated Java collection classes)
• set up of postgres access controls so that code and myself (using psql) could create and then access the database
• SQL for key transactions, and in particular complex joins in order to extract the family relationships from the database
• set up of jdbc driver for Postgres and configuration in Tomcat so that could access family tree database
• set up of a datasource realm in Tomcat and a users database in Postgres to provide access controls to application
• html encoding
• css encoding
• javascript and how to use within the Tapestry framework
• Povray to create the chandlerfamily logo (not in the timeframe of this project – was done earlier)
• inkscape to draw graphic items
• gimp to convert graphic items to gif