"we came, we saw, we bought"... Head First
Servlets and
JSP.
The servlets assignments loom closer, and in preparation for this, I installed orion. Ah... it sounds so innocent, said in such a manner. In truth, that statement hides an epic tale of sweat and confusion.
First of all, I downloaded and installed
j2ee without jdk, because sheesh - I have been developing stuff in
java, so obviously I have jdk, right? Well, probably, but for some reason, j2ee_no_jdk did not recognize any of the places I told it to look for the java runtime environment. So I went ahead and installed the entire enterprise edition with jdk. Oh, well, I have loads of space on this box. What's a little redundancy going to hurt?
Then I downloaded orion, and did about seven installs... No luck getting it running no matter where I pointed my browser and which ports I had orion use. After a few more blind alleys, I realized that I probably should be doing this as root, and less than five minutes later, the BeeServlet actually said 'buzz'. I felt like a hero.
Of course, I couldn't just have a shiney new web server on my computer and not use it for anything, so I decided to complete the first servlets assignment. Lo and behold, the code produced the expected result.
But I had no idea why it worked, so I went on to solve the next one as well, hoping that a light bulb would ignite. Amazingly, I managed to produce functional code for that one as well, but no lightbulb. And that is where visa came in: Head First Servlets and JSP on amazon.co.uk.
I am so going to get the hang of this!