Note: This is a work in progress, please see the index page for more details.

In most, if not all, programming books you get a “Hello World” application that consists of the minimal requirements necessary to build and run an application; it’s cute and it’s traditional but it’s not always enough to really give you anything to work with, especially as you get into using multiple technologies, APIs and frameworks all at the same time. That is where the idea for this “book” came about. I have created web applications from scratch numerous times over the years using various different technologies and for the most part it is never trivial and very little end-to-end documentation exists… so I figured that I would do it one more time with all the bells and whistles and actually document things along the way. My hope is that this will at least be somewhat useful to someone doing this for the first time.

In order to demonstrate the setup, development and management techniques without too much unnecessary fluff involved, I will be developing a database-driven hello world web application, built with Spring MVC, Hibernate, HsqlDb, MySQL, Tomcat, Eclipse, Maven 2 and CruiseControl. Now if that does not sound like overkill you probably go over your estimates a bit often. I will avoid discussing the installation of the tools and frameworks as much as possible unless they directly relate to the task at hand, or if there are little tips or tricks I have to offer.

Of course, there are frameworks (or is it a technology) like Grails that do most of the above for you, which is great if you can use it (and Grails is very nice to work in), if not you will need to know how to build out this stuff from scratch; also, it’s a good thing to know and have done at least once.