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I have an idea on how to revamp our internal application, after having accessed the needs of the users, addressing thier current issues, and the like.

But I am not a coder. My last application I wrote was in college, in C, (java wasn't invented-ish!) and it was a booking system, with the option to add on other modules, blah blah. I got an A, but I became a system administrator instead, more intrested in designing and maintainend networks and infrastructure, but with the advent of virtualisation, and linux management tools such as puppet I can now manage infrastructure in my sleep!

Now I want to write code - to put on my infastructure, and I want to build .... a booking system! This is just to get experience, but I am at a loss as to where to start.

Setting up the environment, will take me about a day. Writing the spec, even how I want it to work, I already know, but as for actually coding in a decent manner, I can only guess.

If anyone can recommend a book, website, blog, twitter person to follow, or just advice on how to build a kick butt basic jboss app, then please, "I AM READY TO LEARN" :)

John Vandenberg
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Mister IT Guru
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Since you've got some experience I'd suggest the following. However, this is by no means a definitive list: you may want to try Griffon or Grails as a means to get started instead.

This list is fairly conservative and represents a typical medium to large enterprise approach.

  1. Get yourself a good IDE. Eclipse is great, Intellij is awesome.
  2. Use Maven as your build process and follow it's default file structure for your web application (read Better Builds with Maven)
  3. Use open source libraries (RestEasy, Spring, Hibernate and so on)
  4. Adhere to open standards (HTTP, HTML5, CSS3 and so on)
  5. Use version control (start with SVN, Mercurial or Git)
  6. Start small and build out with small changes as you gain experience and understanding of your environment

Rather than wading straight in with something as large as JBoss, perhaps consider using the Jetty plugin within your Maven build file. This will give you an environment that supports web applications right out of the box and is trivial to work with. Over time you'll rework your application and you'll find that Jetty will support pretty much everything you'll need.

Later you can use it standalone as an alternative to Tomcat, Glassfish or JBoss for when you want to host your web application.

Gary
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  • Don't forget about Netbeans as an IDE! +1 for everything else though – TheLQ Mar 20 '11 at 15:56
  • Oh my! I forgot that I asked this question! Thanks for the answer. I will be getting eclipse, I am familiar with IntelliJ - My old dev team used it. I have *every* intention of reusing as *much* code as possible, call me lazy, but isn't that the whole point of opensource!? :) – Mister IT Guru Apr 22 '11 at 11:32