I’ll be comments are closed here. All the posts are migrated over to the new site and I’m starting to remove old articles from here and leaving a url to the new site.

beren

If I get that working I’m going to close comments here and open things up over there.

http://tarnaeluin.houseofbeor.net/

What do ya think? Its a wee bit rough so far. The export and import process does not really work too well. All my images moved over but they did not get re-attached properly so when you click on an image it is actually linking back to the wordpress blog. I’ve got a couple of other issues as well – the Aksimet spam crap is not working – even though the stats stuff does seem to be working ok.

What I do like is now I have control of themes and styles so I can make my blog a lot fancier. What are my concerns?

1. I need a spam killer and so far my hosting company is not being too helpful.
2. Performance – seems a bit spotty so far – I’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

I’ll keep working on the new site as I get a chance.

Emulators – What are they?
An emulator is a shell for running an android OS. If you look in your android SDK’s tools folder you can see the binary for the shell. The OS images are configured and stored (by default) under your user’s profile, on windows C:\Users\beren\.android\avd. The shell program requires an AVD (Android Virtual Device) file to startup. – or all the options look here. When you run from within Eclipse there are probably ant scripts or something like that to automate the launching of the binaries. I mention all this in case you get the  same problem I am currently having – the Run As function in Eclipse all of a sudden stopped working and I can’t launch the emulator  – no clue why.

After a bit of poking around I determined that somehow the saved data parts of my e,ulator configuration had become corrupted. I compared my directory structure to the directory structure of a new emulator runtime I created in eclipse. I just deleted all the “extra” files in my original one and tried again and everythign was back to normal.

Bluetooth
There’s a pretty decent set of materials o-line that talk to how to create bluetooth clients and servers for Java. Here’s a fairly comprehensive overview:

• http://developers.sun.com/mobility/apis/articles/bluetoothintro/index.html

You’ll notice something straight off – the article seems to mix J2SE and J2ME and not really clearly state what bluetooth support is in which platforms, how do you get working code, and how would you run these things. The answer is that these articles are generally talking about J2ME techniques and not J2SE. As far as I can tell there still is no true bluetooth support in J2SE java. You need a 3rd party library – I’ve used bluecove for this, howver since I am running on Win64 and this library only runs on a 32-bit JVM I will need to use -d32 option i the VM arguments for the program to run in 32bit mode.

Bluecove has some decent example code that works, for example here is an example to find a device:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Vector;
import javax.bluetooth.*;

/**
 * Minimal Device Discovery example.
 */
public class RemoteDeviceDiscovery {
    public static final Vector/**/ devicesDiscovered = new Vector();
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
        final Object inquiryCompletedEvent = new Object();
        devicesDiscovered.clear();
        DiscoveryListener listener = new DiscoveryListener() {
            public void deviceDiscovered(RemoteDevice btDevice, DeviceClass cod) {
                System.out.println("Device " + btDevice.getBluetoothAddress() + " found");
                devicesDiscovered.addElement(btDevice);
                try {
                    System.out.println("     name " + btDevice.getFriendlyName(false));
                } catch (IOException cantGetDeviceName) {
                }
            }
            public void inquiryCompleted(int discType) {
                System.out.println("Device Inquiry completed!");
                synchronized(inquiryCompletedEvent){
                    inquiryCompletedEvent.notifyAll();
                }
            }
            public void serviceSearchCompleted(int transID, int respCode) {
            }
            public void servicesDiscovered(int transID, ServiceRecord[] servRecord) {
            }
        };
        synchronized(inquiryCompletedEvent) {
            boolean started = LocalDevice.getLocalDevice().getDiscoveryAgent().startInquiry(DiscoveryAgent.GIAC, listener);
            if (started) {
                System.out.println("wait for device inquiry to complete...");
                inquiryCompletedEvent.wait();
                System.out.println(devicesDiscovered.size() +  " device(s) found");
            }
        }
    }
}

Let’s take a look at something similar in Android’s bluetooth APIs:

package com.example.android.BluetoothChat;

import java.util.Set;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.bluetooth.BluetoothAdapter;
import android.bluetooth.BluetoothDevice;
import android.content.BroadcastReceiver;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.content.IntentFilter;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.Window;
import android.view.View.OnClickListener;
import android.widget.AdapterView;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.ListView;
import android.widget.TextView;
import android.widget.AdapterView.OnItemClickListener;

/**
 * This Activity appears as a dialog. It lists any paired devices and
 * devices detected in the area after discovery. When a device is chosen
 * by the user, the MAC address of the device is sent back to the parent
 * Activity in the result Intent.
 */
public class DeviceListActivity extends Activity {
    // Debugging
    private static final String TAG = "DeviceListActivity";
    private static final boolean D = true;

    // Return Intent extra
    public static String EXTRA_DEVICE_ADDRESS = "device_address";

    // Member fields
    private BluetoothAdapter mBtAdapter;
    private ArrayAdapter mPairedDevicesArrayAdapter;
    private ArrayAdapter mNewDevicesArrayAdapter;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        // Setup the window
        requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_INDETERMINATE_PROGRESS);
        setContentView(R.layout.device_list);

        // Set result CANCELED incase the user backs out
        setResult(Activity.RESULT_CANCELED);

        // Initialize the button to perform device discovery
        Button scanButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button_scan);
        scanButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
            public void onClick(View v) {
                doDiscovery();
                v.setVisibility(View.GONE);
            }
        });

        // Initialize array adapters. One for already paired devices and
        // one for newly discovered devices
        mPairedDevicesArrayAdapter = new ArrayAdapter(this, R.layout.device_name);
        mNewDevicesArrayAdapter = new ArrayAdapter(this, R.layout.device_name);

        // Find and set up the ListView for paired devices
        ListView pairedListView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.paired_devices);
        pairedListView.setAdapter(mPairedDevicesArrayAdapter);
        pairedListView.setOnItemClickListener(mDeviceClickListener);

        // Find and set up the ListView for newly discovered devices
        ListView newDevicesListView = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.new_devices);
        newDevicesListView.setAdapter(mNewDevicesArrayAdapter);
        newDevicesListView.setOnItemClickListener(mDeviceClickListener);

        // Register for broadcasts when a device is discovered
        IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter(BluetoothDevice.ACTION_FOUND);
        this.registerReceiver(mReceiver, filter);

        // Register for broadcasts when discovery has finished
        filter = new IntentFilter(BluetoothAdapter.ACTION_DISCOVERY_FINISHED);
        this.registerReceiver(mReceiver, filter);

        // Get the local Bluetooth adapter
        mBtAdapter = BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter();

        // Get a set of currently paired devices
        Set pairedDevices = mBtAdapter.getBondedDevices();

        // If there are paired devices, add each one to the ArrayAdapter
        if (pairedDevices.size() > 0) {
            findViewById(R.id.title_paired_devices).setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            for (BluetoothDevice device : pairedDevices) {
                mPairedDevicesArrayAdapter.add(device.getName() + "\n" + device.getAddress());
            }
        } else {
            String noDevices = getResources().getText(R.string.none_paired).toString();
            mPairedDevicesArrayAdapter.add(noDevices);
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDestroy() {
        super.onDestroy();

        // Make sure we're not doing discovery anymore
        if (mBtAdapter != null) {
            mBtAdapter.cancelDiscovery();
        }

        // Unregister broadcast listeners
        this.unregisterReceiver(mReceiver);
    }

    /**
     * Start device discover with the BluetoothAdapter
     */
    private void doDiscovery() {
        if (D) Log.d(TAG, "doDiscovery()");

        // Indicate scanning in the title
        setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(true);
        setTitle(R.string.scanning);

        // Turn on sub-title for new devices
        findViewById(R.id.title_new_devices).setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);

        // If we're already discovering, stop it
        if (mBtAdapter.isDiscovering()) {
            mBtAdapter.cancelDiscovery();
        }

        // Request discover from BluetoothAdapter
        mBtAdapter.startDiscovery();
    }

    // The on-click listener for all devices in the ListViews
    private OnItemClickListener mDeviceClickListener = new OnItemClickListener() {
        public void onItemClick(AdapterView av, View v, int arg2, long arg3) {
            // Cancel discovery because it's costly and we're about to connect
            mBtAdapter.cancelDiscovery();

            // Get the device MAC address, which is the last 17 chars in the View
            String info = ((TextView) v).getText().toString();
            String address = info.substring(info.length() - 17);

            // Create the result Intent and include the MAC address
            Intent intent = new Intent();
            intent.putExtra(EXTRA_DEVICE_ADDRESS, address);

            // Set result and finish this Activity
            setResult(Activity.RESULT_OK, intent);
            finish();
        }
    };

    // The BroadcastReceiver that listens for discovered devices and
    // changes the title when discovery is finished
    private final BroadcastReceiver mReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
        @Override
        public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
            String action = intent.getAction();

            // When discovery finds a device
            if (BluetoothDevice.ACTION_FOUND.equals(action)) {
                // Get the BluetoothDevice object from the Intent
                BluetoothDevice device = intent.getParcelableExtra(BluetoothDevice.EXTRA_DEVICE);
                // If it's already paired, skip it, because it's been listed already
                if (device.getBondState() != BluetoothDevice.BOND_BONDED) {
                    mNewDevicesArrayAdapter.add(device.getName() + "\n" + device.getAddress());
                }
            // When discovery is finished, change the Activity title
            } else if (BluetoothAdapter.ACTION_DISCOVERY_FINISHED.equals(action)) {
                setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(false);
                setTitle(R.string.select_device);
                if (mNewDevicesArrayAdapter.getCount() == 0) {
                    String noDevices = getResources().getText(R.string.none_found).toString();
                    mNewDevicesArrayAdapter.add(noDevices);
                }
            }
        }
    };
}

Well – the first thing you’ll notice is that the code samples are pretty darn different and the first reaction might be “oh come on Google why couldn’t you use the J2ME and J2SE APIs. Well once you get beyond that first reaction the main difference I can see is that the Andorid APIs are a higher level APi that hides alot of the underlying grunt code necessary for J2ME and J2SE bluetooth connections. The Android above is from the Chat sample – a comprehensive example of bluetooth coding.

I’m going to try a couple of things next:

• Get the chat sample working between two Android devices
• Try to get some connectivity and things working between a J2SE client and an Android client. I’ll switch to a Fedora linux client for that one I think.

Ok the wordpress generated report is goofy – working on some decent stats. This year was a tough one for me – I had a lot of responsibilities at work that took away from blogging and my karate practice with my son also takes time away from general messing around…although to me that’s a good reason not to blog!

Total all time reads: 173K – wow!

Top Posts in 2011 (excluding my home page with 7K reads):

• Drupal 7 – Rich Text Editing and Uploading Images 14,596 reads
• Google’s Window Builder Pro for Eclipse 3.6 5,506 reads
• Images & Galleries in Drupal 6 4,837 reads
• Using Views in Drupal 6 3,877 reads
• Installing GateIn 3.1 on My JBoss 5.1 Instance 2,017 reads
• Revisiting Galleries with Drupal 6.15 1,064 reads
• See ya JBoss Portal – Hello GateIn 3.1 – Part 1 855 reads
• Practical Tips for Working with Oracle 11g 842 reads
• Building Modules with Drupal 6 798 reads
• J2ME Development: NetBeans 6.7M2 vs. Eclipse MTJ 0.91 758 reads

My Drupal 7 Rich Text Editing article is by far the most commented on with 25 comments.I’m really surprised at the number of reads on my Window Builder post – I guess Java app development is not dead after all.

Top referrers are a bit harder to figure out. Putting aside all search engines thesea are the top referring sites:

1. Drupal.org
2. facebook.com
3. disboards.com
4. sabbsunited.com
5. community.jboss.org
6. linkedin.com
7. cmsopensource.it

I get google refs are a bizillion google’s for every country. Russia leads the pack.

Top Clicks out:

1. drupal.org/project/imce    939
2. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/d7-rte-5.png    716
3. drupalmodules.com    711
4. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/d7-rte-4.png    567
5. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/d7-rte-2.png    498
6. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/d7-rte-6.png    427
7. drupal.org/project/ckeditor    400
8. code.google.com/javadevtools/wbpro/installation/updatesite_3.6.html    351
9. drupal.org/project/wysiwyg    335
10. ckeditor.com    291
11. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/ij9-1.png    245
12. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/images_shot1.jpg    192
13. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/wbp-2.png    188
14. tarnaeluin.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/views2.png    186
15. drupal.org/project/slideshow_creator    161

That does it for stats! Happy New Year!

I’ll continue to mess around with the themes and play with options – the current theme as I write this ( 12/31/2011) is based on Pilcrow. I’ll put screen shots of each below in case you had something better to do while I was messing around The second shot is using Twenty Eleven – I think I prefer this one mostly because the article width is more than Pilcrow.

I think I pretty happy with the Twenty Eleven – it is clean and simple and a bit wider than the others (still cannot adjust this in the options). The header graphic is a bit large, but its ok. Ted Nasmith is the artist – quite a famous guy with LOTR fans. He’s done a bunch of pics that I really like. The other favorite of mine is a painting of Gondolin – the hidden city of Turgon. He has a number of pics of Beren and Luthien. I’ll have to make a bunch to round robin in the banner area.

Calm Down – its Apple
Ok – no biggie I’ll just call customer service. Uhh…I guess I will not call customer service…there is no number. WTF? They have my money and I have to send an email and wait at least 48 hours for a response. Ok…its Apple – they love customers – I’ll wait since I still have $25 I can get my music still.

Corruption….d’oh
I downloaded the album and thought all was well. I ran about doing some stuff with the music playing – I wasn’t paying attention too much. Came back and sat down for the last song to hear it cut out after about 10-15 seconds. I checked all the songs and 5 of the 30 songs were messed up and wouldn’t play.

Still maintaining a sense of calm, I figure – ok just download them again. Uh – you can’t! WTF? I google around on “corrupted iTunes songs” or “iTunes song stops after a few seconds”. There’s one article copied and pasted onto a bizillion sites that says to delete the stuff in your downloads/TMP folder. Uh…don’t got one of those. All those posts don’t seem to pertain to Windows 7.

Breathing deep…ugh…my dealer called in the middle of all this to tell me they got the wrong seal for the rear differential on my car so it wil be another day without my car….ok that does it!

How to Fix Things?
The next best advice I could find on the internet, the Apple site, or the forums was to contact Apple customer service (yes another 48 hour deal with email). Screw that! Here’s what you do:

1. Take a deep breath, be careful, and backup everything…especially your music files.
2. Update iTunes to the very latest – start it up and then close it down.
3. Go into My Music and iTunes and backup anything “library” in the name and also the “bk” directory. I copied these to somewhere else on the machine.
4. Go into your iTunes Music directory find the messed up songs and move them somewhere else – do not leave a copy here. Confirm that the songs are messed up in another media player – I used Nero’s player.
5. Startup iTunes and under “Store” click “Purchased”.
6. Go to the songs in iTunes try to play them – they will get an error and an icon
7. Delete the songs from iTunes
8. Click “Download Previous Purchases”
9. Click on “Not in My Library”
10. iTunes will list the songs you just deleted
11. Highlight each song and a download link should appear.
12. Song will download and you should be good to go.

I performed this on Win7 64 Home Premium with iTunes 10.5.2 – no clue if this will work on other versions or OS’s. I do not have the iCloud crap working either.

Yo Apple – how about a big page or FAQ on this? Now where’s my $13???

Eclipse ADK
I’m going to be using the Eclipse ADK plugin for development (see my other post for info. on that). A smart place to start is the great set of sample applications that come with the ADK. In Eclipse go to new project, other, and android. Under there you should see a Android Sample folder with a lot of templates to get going quickly. I picked off the “widget preview” project as a good place to get started. In this example you can get a good view of UI and event handling and also lots of samples for controllers and other OS level stuff. I see there are also samples for some bluetooth stuff…cool…maybe this will be easy

The next step is to make sure that you have the latest and greatest installed. Using the ADK Manager from either inside Eclipse or from the start menu I’ve added all the latest updates to my current SDKs and also added the new 4.0.3 SDK for tablets. You should be able to right-click the project and click Run As and pick off Android Application.

If that choice is missing then you need to add a run configuration from the same menu – I described this in my earlier post so I won’t again here….onto the code! You should run your program just to make sure that all the stuff is working properly – it does take quite some time to startup the tablet OS emulator. It could be that this program just takes a while to load.I found that I had to change my run configuration launch to “manual” in order to select between launching the app as a tablet vs. a phone.

This project is one class file that loads up related sets of widgets. If you look at the code there are a couple of click handlers that pass variables to control what sets of widgets are on screen. The widgets don’t really do anything, but you get to see the basic set for your apps. Moving on the Contact Manager example is a good example to look at because it interacts with the base OS data structures for accounts and contacts. The contact manager’s main class extends Activity, implements the OnAccountsUpdateListener interface., and initializes the app and gui in the onCreate function. The program contains several utility classes for data handling and synch with the base OS contact/account management machinery. To see the GUI layout look in the res\layout folder and double-click one of the xml files. The Pixel Perfect interface should open up automatically. If it does not switch manually to the perspective – or right click the XML file and use open with to open the editor you want. Pixel Perfect is the GUI layout tool for the ADK. Compared to other GUI layout tools it is a bit odd to work with. Why? There is no visible set of “properties” to manipulate.

If you have used WindowBuilder Pro (another Google tool that is now part of Eclipse for designing desktop Java apps), Pixel Perfect’s layout tools and buttons look and work similar. To access properties of a specific widget dropped onto a canvas you need to right click it – or go to the XML and edit it by hand. It takes a  bit of fiddling around and the terminology is a bit odd – there are better places to read about this than here:

• http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/PixelPerfectCodeInteractionDesignAndroid.html
• http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/debugging/debugging-ui.html#pixelperfect

Pixel Perfect combines with a few other tools later in the development cycle to help optimize your GUI. These are available through the HierarchyViewer tool – a pretty cool tool that helps you inspect and tune all your screens during run time testing.

This was about Bluetooth right?
Ah yeah – that’s right – well let’s take a peek at some bluetooth and compare it a bit to J2ME and J2SE in my next post. I want to spend a bit more time messing with the Perfect Pixel stuff.

Installation Experience
Couldn’t really be easier – download an ISO and burn it to a CD (yes the OS does not need a full DVD). Boot up your machine and make sure you like what you see, and then you can choose to install the OS or forget it. I of course chose the installation (otherwise I woudln’t be writing this) and since I had Fedora 13 installed I just had it blow the entire machine away. The install was complete in about 5-10 minutes. I spent more time and effort applying the OS-X 10.7 update to my Mac!

Eye Candy!
A quick boot up and wow – nice look and feel! Let’s face it, Linux is a kind of a geek tool and the UI has always looked that way, but the new look on first boot up is pretty nice. The look is very clean – not even a trash can, for a gear head like me it is a little disconcerting.  Everything on the machine is accessed thru the top menu bar – from left to right:

• Activities – here’s where the “dock” is and access to all open programs and applciations.
• Program Icon – the active program will get a spot next to that.
• Calendar – quick access right there to the time, date, anda  calendar planner.
• On the right is all your configuration options for the machine. Super easy bluethooth, WiFi, handicapped stuff, different color schemes, and a nice tie in for integration with Google.
• If you click on your name you find access to things like system settings (phew – there they are).

The set of screens below show a bunch of screen shots of these things:

That’s all great – but I still want control! No worries – after a couple of seconds wondering if Fedora has gone the Windows and OS-X route of obfuscating access to the computer and its settings (where the heck did the hard drive go on OS-X 10.7!!!), I realized that complete access is available thru the settings and yes the terminal is right there in Activities – Applications. I immediately dragged and dropped the terminal out onto my doc. All is right again with the Penguin

Check out all that software in the applications folder. Wow – everything you need – video, music, internet stuff, Firefox, etc.

Running Software
Straight off I grabbed Java 1.7U2 and installed this and then grabbed JBoss 7.1 Beta 1. Java installed. While I was doing that I kicked off a system update. That ran while I wrote this post and completed in the background at some point.  A quick extract of jboss and fire up that tool and things are working just fine. While that was happening I checked out the Rhythmbox music player – can thing thing recognize my ipod and do something? Ahhh…yes and no. D’oh. Gotta get Eclipse now…

F16 has cool desktop views to help get your app back into the foreground. Just click on Activities and you’ll get a view like this:

Then you can pick your app from the thumbnails or pick from a set of desktops you have setup – not new stuff for Linux, but accessing this and using it seems much more intuitive than in the past.

Fedora Plus – whoo-hooo!!!
F16 did recognize my iPod, but I’m missing codecs and R-box failed to locate them. A qiuck google and I found a set of great tutorials on the FedoraForum site. If you want to make life easy go t othe first link about AutoPlus and install that program. It is essentially a short list of common goodies that you can install. I grabbed it and installed MP3 codecs plus all the other codecs for videos and DVDs. I disconnected and reconnected my iPod and hey it works! Try that on Win-bloze or a Mac! No iTunes means no daily 90MB downloads!

About My Machine - Long Live the Penguin!
I’m running this on a 4 year old T60p “pre-Lenovo” ThinkPad with an ATI card for graphics and 2 GB of RAM. Performance is pretty snappy – while writing this I was downloading and applying updates, playing music, running JBoss app server and I accidentally started up Orca so I was running the screen reader and braille support. Point being – I can run all this on a machine that Windows 7 or OS-X 10.7 would totally choke on and I’m doing it easily – it took a long time, but finally I think we have a Linux distro that really is ready for the average human to deal with.
PS: One peeve – what’s up with no window minnimize button?? Right click on the title bar to minimize a window…

What’s Required for Wicket?
Well any modern framework will require a bunch of stuff – you’ll need Eclipse (I’m using 3.7), Java 1.6.xxx, Maven, Subclipse, and the M2E plugin installed from the Eclipse site (not sonatype). Before doing anything I recommend getting the latest updates for all that stuff. Make sure you can run “mvn” from a command line while you are at it. It definitely helps to understand what Maven is and generally how it works. That’s pretty much it.

A First Test
The Quickstart on the Wicket site is a good first test, run thru this and see if all is well. Once you get the project downloaded with mvn and then added into Eclipse you should be able to start the internal server from the java class src/test/java/com.houseofbeor.Start.java file. Don’t forget to first stop anything running on 8080 or you’ll get a port conflict.

That seemed to work ok for me, but of course my next question would be how do I deploy that to a real server. More on that later since there is no mention on the Wicket site for how to do that. In the meantime there are a bunch of examples to play around with. You can see them on the Wicket site, but that’s not too much fun.

If you grab the source bundle then you can run them all locally. Extract the zip somewhere on your PC, then copy src\wicket-examples to a folder on your machine where you can mess with it using maven. Go to the root (wicket-examples) and execute a mvn build and then a mvn install. After that do a mvn eclipse:eclipse and you can add the entire thing to Eclipse as a project like with the Quickstart. You’ll notice after running the install that a .war file is dropped out for you. If you have a local app server you can deploy this to your apps directory and see everything local. Browsing thru the war packaging at least gives me some assurance that at the end of the day what you are deploying is a true war file…it also is a scary confirmation that maven is a useful tool that I know very little about since it has transformed the baffling development setup into a nicely organized war that deployed with no issues on my tomcat 7 server.

What’s even more impressive is that with the server up and running and clicking thru a bunch of the examples, tomcat is hovering, with a default config, in the 100 MB range – try that with a reasonable Spring or Seam configuration.

Deploying the App
The easiest way I found to deploy your app is to go back to the command line and do a maven install. This generates a complete war file that you can then drop into your app server. Works great.

Digging into the Examples and Rolling my Own
Starting at the top with the HelloWorld you can add these to your quickstart base. Here’s how I’ve done this:

To make it easy to browse the example code create a new Eclipse project from the code base you created above….ruh ro…no workie…I get build failures citing build path issues. Um – well there must be some problem with pom.xml, but I can see the build path is right – not sure what is wrong. Well – I can still browse around the code. I’ll fix this later….hmmm I smell something…pumpkin pie, turkey, sweet potatoes…time to go. I’ll post a Pt 2 with more interesting stuff on creating custom apps.

A bit on my system:

1.  1. Latest JDK 1.6
2. 2. Eclipse Indigo
3. 3. Tomcat 7 – latest
4. 4. Windows 7 -64 Bit

More to come…in Part 2.